2022/25094 - Dog and Cat thefts

REQUEST

I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information:

Please provide me with a breakdown of reported dog and cat thefts, for your area, for each year since 2015, for your Police Force.

RESPONSE

We can only provide information from 2017 onwards.

There is no filter to identify if there was an animal theft. To find this information, a manual trawl would have to be completed on each offence within this time period which were categorised as ‘All other Theft’ or ‘Theft from the Person’. There are 4948 such offences recorded in 2017 alone.

It would take 2 minutes to look through each record to identify if there was a dog or cat theft. This would take over 164 hours to complete (4948 records x 2 minutes per record = 9896 minutes = 164+ hours) which is over the 18 hours and would therefore be exempt under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

To avoid an exemption, a keyword search has been completed on the crime summaries of all crimes recorded in 2017 to 2022 where the offence had been categorised as ‘All other Theft’ or ‘Theft from the Person’. This includes any and all crime summaries with the terms in – it doesn’t confirm whether those offences were necessarily the theft of the dogs or cats. The following terms were used in this search

• Dog
• Cat
• Puppy
• Kitten

Please see the below table for the results.