2022/25020 - Crimes Recorded as Violence Against The Person
REQUEST
How many crimes were recorded under the offence group, violence against the person?
For the following calendar years (if your force records financial years rather than calendar please provide the data for this).
2019,2020,2021 and 2022 to date 01/03/22
How many crimes recorded within the offence group: violence against the person were linked to steroid abuse?
For the following calendar years (if your force records financial years rather than calendar please provide the data for this).
2019,2020, 2021 and 2022 to date 01/03/22.
If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the information exceeding the time or cost limits identified in Section 12, please provide the information in part and chronologically with a priority placed upon 2022 data.
RESPONSE
How many crimes were recorded under the offence group, violence against the person?
For the following calendar years (if your force records financial years rather than calendar please provide the data for this).
2019,2020,2021 and 2022 to date 01/03/22
The above table provides information on the number of recorded violence against the person offences for the years 2019 to 2022. The data in the year 2022 covers from the 1st of January 2022 to the 1st of March 2022.
How many crimes recorded within the offence group: violence against the person were linked to steroid abuse?
For the following calendar years (if your force records financial years rather than calendar please provide the data for this).
2019,2020, 2021 and 2022 to date 01/03/22.
To get this information we would need to manually check each offence that was recorded as violence against the person to check for the ones relating to steroid abuse.
Unfortunately, we cannot answer this request as it will exceed the 18-hour time limit to complete the request. In 2022 alone, there have been 3,914 offences. In order to retrieve the data, each record would need to be reviewed. It would take approximately three minutes to review each individual record, which would equate to 195+ hours of research. 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.
Please Note:
As an alternative, we have searched on our systems for violence against the person offences between the dates 2019 and 2022.
We have then conducted a keyword search using the term ‘steroid’ on the summary of each offence, with the intention of reviewing the ones highlighted as containing the key word to check it met the requirements of the request (checking it was relating to steroid abuse).
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 words were not mentioned in the summaries, then it would not be highlighted for us to check.
This keyword search returned no results, so there was nothing to manually review. None of our violence against the person offences contained the word ‘steroid’ in the summary.