Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA)
 
Thank you for your email received today in which you make a request for
information that Northumbria Police may hold in accordance with the
Freedom Of Information Act 2000
 
We are in the process of dealing with your request and a response should
be provided to you by 25/02/2019 which is in accordance with the
legislation.
 
Yours sincerely
 
Information Management Unit
[1]www.northumbria.police.uk | [2]www.northumbria-pcc.gov.uk

'Northumbria Police will be outstanding in the service we provide'
'We will do this through protecting the Vulnerable, delivering quality
Investigations and applying Problem solving to everything we do to protect
the communities we serve.'
 

show quoted sections

Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom
of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')

Thank you for your e mail dated 27 January 2019 in which you made a
request for access to certain information which may be held by Northumbria
Police.

As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of
access to information held at the time of a request, by a Public Authority
(including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.

You asked:

1.

Please state the number of allegations of

a) Rape

b) Sexual assault

c) Sexual harassment

d) Sexual misconduct

received by your force, where the location code of the offence was
recorded as being a) a hospital and/or b) a GP surgery, in each of the
last five calendar years: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

2. For each of these allegations, please provide the incident date,
location, brief details of allegations, whether a suspect was identified,
whether a suspect was arrested, whether a suspect was charged, and whether
a suspect was convicted.

We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I
provide a response for your attention.

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the
Corporate Development Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that
the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police, however
cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.

To provide information which meets the criteria of your request,
particularly at questions C would entail a member of staff manually
searching all harassment records within the time frame to identify those
of a sexual nature. There was an excess of 11,000 crimes recorded in 2017.
Even at a conservative estimate of 3 minutes per record, which we have
considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this
information would take over 550 hours for 2017 alone, therefore Section
12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act would apply. This section does not
oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the
authority estimated that the cost of complying with the request would
exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours, equating to £450.00

You should consider this to be a refusal notice under Section 17 of the
Act for your request.

As part of your request would exceed the prescribed limit, as defined by
the Act, there is no requirement for Northumbria Police to provide a
response to the remaining parts of your request. However, in order to
provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of
Information Act 2000, an initial assessment of the information that may be
provided within the time constraints would be the number of crimes which
were recorded as rape, rape allegation, sexual assault or harassment (all
harassment) and where the location was hospital or GP surgery.

Sexual misconduct is a broad term and there are no specific offences which
we are able to search on, these are likely to fall under sexual assault or
harassment.

If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request
accordingly.

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a
specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an
indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another.
Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the
procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses
between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative
purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual
property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be
strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as
amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not
re-use this information for any commercial purpose.

You may be interested to know that Northumbria Police routinely publish
information via the Disclosure Log. The aim of the Disclosure Log is to
promote openness and transparency by voluntarily placing information into
the public arena.

The Disclosure Log contains copies of some of the information that has
been disclosed by Northumbria Police in response to requests made under
the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Whilst it is not possible to publish all responses we will endeavour to
publish those where we feel that the information disclosed is in the wider
public interest.

The Disclosure Log will be updated once responses have been sent to the
requester.

I have provided the relevant link below.

[1]https://beta.northumbria.police.uk/about...

How to complain

If you are unhappy with our decision or do not consider that we have
handled your request properly and we are unable to resolve this issue
informally, you are entitled to make a formal complaint to us under our
complaints procedure, attached.

If you are still unhappy after we have investigated your complaint and
reported to you the outcome, you may complain directly to the Information
Commissioner’s Office and request that they investigate to ascertain
whether we have dealt with your request in accordance with the Act.

Yours sincerely

Michael Cleugh

Data Protection and Disclosure Advisor

[NOT PROTECTIVELY MARKED]

'Northumbria Police will be outstanding in the service we provide'

'We will do this through protecting the Vulnerable, delivering quality
Investigations and applying Problem solving to everything we do to protect
the communities we serve.'

NORTHUMBRIA POLICE PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE The information
contained in this message and any attachment(s) is confidential and
intended only for the attention of the named organisation or individual to
whom it is addressed. The message may contain information that is covered
by legal, professional or other privilege. No mistake in transmission is
intended to waive or compromise any such privilege. This message has been
sent over public networks and the sender cannot be held responsible for
its integrity. If you are not the intended recipient be aware that any
disclosure, copying, distribution or action taken in reliance of the
information contained herein is strictly prohibited, and is contrary to
the provisions of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 1988 and of the
Data Protection Act, 2018. Any views expressed are those of the sender
and, unless specifically stated, do not necessarily represent the view of
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message in error, please notify the sender by e-mail at once and delete
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please visit our website - http://www.northumbria.police.uk

References

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