2022/25429 - Luxury Watch Crimes

REQUEST

Could I please request info on crimes involving and associated with watches worth more than £5,000 so far this year, and over the last 3 calendar years, with the information broken down according to year. Or clarity, what I mean by involving and associated with, is crimes that happened at the same time – for example theft and abh if a person was assaulted while their watch was being stolen.

If possible within the time limit, I would like to know the kinds of crimes and details of any that led to successful prosecution of five years or more.

Ie, 2019, 15 robbery, 12 abh – John Smith jailed for six years for robbery and gbh, Heather Jones jailed or 5 years for 12 counts of robbery.

If this is not possible within the statutory time limit, please could you let me know and we could discuss what information could be obtained within the time limit.

RESPONSE

To provide the information for this request we have completed a key word search of Watch within the MO summaries. Please note that the key word search is restricted to the summaries, as a key word search of the full data log is not available. If the key word was not mentioned in the summaries, then it would not be highlighted for us to check. This keyword search returned 1681 as each summary would need to be checked to ensure it meets the requirements of this request, it would exceed the timeframe of 18 hours as each record would take approximately 1 minute to view.

1681 records x 1 minute per viewing / 60 minutes = 28 hours

Alternatively, we have searched the MO for ‘luxury watch’ for the years 2019 – 04/09/2022 (to date) and it has returned just 1 crime. 

Therefore, a Section 12 Excess Cost exemption has been applied.

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.

If possible within the time limit, I would like to know the kinds of crimes and details of any that led to successful prosecution of five years or more.

Ie, 2019, 15 robbery, 12 abh – John Smith jailed for six years for robbery and gbh, Heather Jones jailed or 5 years for 12 counts of robbery.

We cannot provide this data as the data belongs to the Courts who issue the Prosecution.  The number of Prosecutions can be obtained from the Courts.