2022/25045 - Stolen Cars
REQUEST
I have detailed the request below, which relates to cars stolen and retrieved in the past year.
- In total, how many of the cars reported as stolen in 2021 were located and returned to the owner?
- Of the cars located and returned to their owners last year, please provide the total amount of time between the vehicle being stolen and the vehicle being returned.
- If possible, please provide the location(s) in which these returned vehicles were found:
- In transport (e.g. whilst being driven on a motorway)
- At a port
- Garage
- On a street
- Online (i.e. identified through a sale listing)
- Public car park
- Private car park
- Field or other public space
- Of the cars reported as stolen in 2021, how many of them were found to have been ‘dumped’ or ‘dropped’ by the thief?
RESPONSE
- In total, how many of the cars reported as stolen in 2021 were located and returned to the owner?
To capture the information the offence titles ‘theft of a motor vehicle’, ‘aggravated vehicle taking’ and ‘aggravated vehicle taking (driving/being carried) offences causing damage to vehicle and/or other property under £5000’ were selected. The aggravated vehicle taking offences were selected as this offence is where a person takes a vehicle without consent and either drives dangerously, causes an accident in which a person is injured, or causes an accident in which property (other than the stolen vehicle) is damaged.
We then filtered the motor vehicle types to only show cars and filtered on recovered to only show cars that were recovered by the police, other agency and the owner. Recovered cars was used instead of returned to the owner as cars returned to the owner would have been a manual trawl.
A manual trawl would have needed to be conducted on all cars that had been reported as stolen in 2021 which would have exceeded the timeframe of 18 hours. In 2021 there were 366 recorded stolen cars x 3 minutes viewing per record / 60 = 18.3 hours.
Section 12 – Excess Cost
The exemption applicable to the information you have requested for this question can be found at Section 12(1) of the Act and this refusal notice is issued under Section 17.
Section 12(1) “does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.”
In the case of a police force, the appropriate limit is set at £450, which is calculated at £25 per hour (i.e., 18 hours). Gwent Police would have to conduct a manual search to find and extract the information for this question. This would take more than 18 hours of staff time therefore we are unable to answer this question and the exemption is engaged.
Please note that some vehicles have been removed from the table above as they were originally recorded as theft but have later found that the vehicles have not been taxed, therefore their vehicles have been seized and are not considered as theft.
- Of the cars located and returned to their owners last year, please provide the total amount of time between the vehicle being stolen and the vehicle being returned.
The below table provides the timeframe of which the car was recorded as stolen to when it was recovered. The information above is based on when the offence was recorded to the police, the reason for this is that in some cases the owner of the vehicle are unsure of when their car was stolen.
Please note that the information provided may not be accurate as the recorded time may not be from the person who owns the car and may be from a witness who has come across an abandoned car. The victim may not be aware that their vehicle has been stolen, some may receive information from the police that their vehicle has been in a crash and that is when they have realised that their vehicle has been stolen. The ones that are 0 days, 0 hours and 0 minutes may be the result of these.
The above table provides information on when it was recovered instead of returned to the owner. This is because not all cases provide a date for when the car was returned to the owner. Please note that the timeframe given may not be completely accurate as other forces may have recovered the car and have later been logged, other agencies or the owner themselves may have recovered the vehicle, therefore the time it was logged may be hours later.
- If possible, please provide the location(s) in which these returned vehicles were found:
- In transport (e.g., whilst being driven on a motorway)
- At a port
- Garage
- On a street
- Online (i.e., identified through a sale listing)
- Public car park
- Private car park
- Field or other public space
The above table provides the location in which the car was located and recovered in 2021. Those that are labelled as unknown are a result of other agency or owner that has recovered their car and may not have disclosed the location to the police.
- Of the cars reported as stolen in 2021, how many of them were found to have been ‘dumped’ or ‘dropped’ by the thief?
To capture this, each record was viewed in search of the vehicle being abandoned with no suspect within the vehicle. This returned 57 results in 2021 of which a car had been abandoned with no one present inside the vehicle.