May 16, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Sexual Offences
Request Number: FOI/14485
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Sexual Offences
Subject: Sexual Assault Data
Request and Answer:
Your request for information below has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) We can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does hold the information you have requested however it is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. We have explained to you below that when PSNI estimates whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if certain conditions are met. In this case those conditions are met and complying with all of your requests would in our estimation exceed that appropriate limit set out in Regulation.
We have explained this further below but also we followed the Information Commissioner’s Office guidance ‘Requests where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit’ in relation to this request, which also provides further detail on the application of Section 12 (1) of the FOIA. This guidance is available on the ICO website at the following link:
Request 1
The number of reported incidents of:
a) Rape or attempted rape (Section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act)
b) Sexual assault by penetration (Section 2 of the Sexual Offences Act)
c) Sexual assault (Section 3 of the Sexual Offences Act)
d) Stalking (Section 2 of the Protection from Harassment Act)
e) Harassment (Section 2a of the Protection from Harassment Act)
where the free text associated with the incident report contains any of the following the words:
- Online Dating
- Internet Dating
- Tinder
- Bumble
- Feeld
- Match.com
- Hinge
- eHarmony
- Dating App or
- Plenty Of Fish
We would like this information for 1 Jan 2024 to 31 December 2024 (1 year), or the most recent 12 month period available.
Request 2
Of all the reported incidents of sexual assault, rape, and stalking (etc) made to your constabulary in the most recent 12-month period, what proportion involved cases where the victim first met or connected with the perpetrator through a dating app?
Answers
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires the Police Service of Northern Ireland, when refusing to provide such information (because the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit) to provide you the applicant with a notice which states that fact.
It is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Section 12 of FOIA allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to either comply with the request in its entirety or confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. The estimate must be reasonable in the circumstances of the case.
The ‘appropriate limit’ is currently £600 for central government and £450 for all other public authorities including PSNI. The relevant Regulations which define the appropriate limit for section 12 purposes are The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees)
Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244. These are known as the ‘Fees Regulations’ for brevity.
Regulation 4(3) of the Fees Regulations states that a public authority can take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in carrying out the following permitted activities in complying with the request:
(i) determining whether the information is held;
(ii) locating the information, or a document containing it;
(iii) retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and
(iv) extracting the information from a document containing it.
Under those regulations PSNI can calculate the time spent on each of these permitted activities at
£25 per hour (thus if the activity(s) takes more than 18 hours PSNI will be in excess of the ‘appropriate limit’).
When a public authority is estimating whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if the conditions laid out in Regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations can be satisfied. Those conditions require the requests to be:
- made by one person, or by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign;
- made for the same or similar information; and
- received by the public authority within any period of 60 consecutive working days.
Regulation 5(2) of the Fees Regulations requires that the requests which are to be aggregated relate “to any extent” to the same or similar information. This is quite a wide test but public authorities should still ensure that the requests meet this requirement.
Enquiries made in relation to your request has identified that retrieval of information to respond to your request would exceed the FOI legislative cost of 18 hours as set by the Secretary of State. It is enquiries in relation to request 2 that has resulted in your request being deemed as an over cost as the information requested whilst held electronically on the PSNI’s central database is not held in a searchable format. There is no classification on the PSNI database that relates to dating apps, and unfortunately ‘keyword" searches are an unreliable method of collecting information from the recording database, as they rely on searching through unstructured data. This means that you cannot automatically determine the context of the term found in the search result. For unstructured data fields we also cannot rely on the data having been entered in such a way as to identify those records that are relevant. Spelling mistakes, abbreviations and aliases can all affect the reliability of a keyword search.
In addition, we do not have the ability to search for keywords within external documents stored on our system, so the scope with which we can do a keyword search is limited. Therefore to ascertain if an occurrence meets the criteria of your request a manual trawl of all crimes recorded in requested timeframe would be required. In the time period 1st January 2024 to 31st December 2024 there were a total of 10,531 relevant crimes recorded. To manually review this data at a conservative estimate of 2 minutes per record, would equate to over 351 hours of work, which grossly exceeds the 18 hour time limit set by Secretary of State.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter should be considered as a Refusal Notice, and the request has therefore been closed.
Advice and assistance
You may wish to submit a refined request in order that the cost of complying with your request may be facilitated within the ‘appropriate limit’. In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, we have considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit and we can advise that we may be able to provide the data for request 1 as refinement if you still wish to obtain it.
Submission of a refined request would be treated as a new request, and considered in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, including consideration of relevant Part II exemptions.