FOI 676-2023 / July 2023 / Burglaries
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 676-2023
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 18th July 2023 as follows:
Please may you provide me with:
Q1. An Excel spreadsheet that provides an hourly breakdown, of the occurrence of burglaries in your jurisdiction. I would like a column in 1-hour intervals over a 24-hour period and another column with the number of burglaries that occurred. This will be from the period 01/01/2022 – 31/12/2022 or the latest 365-day period.
Q2. An Excel Spreadsheet that provides a daily breakdown of the occurrence of burglaries in your jurisdiction. I would like the first column to be the first date of that week, whilst columns 2 – 8 will have the frequency of burglaries for that day of the week. The rows will be in weekly intervals and the columns will be broken down by day of the week (Monday, Tuesday etc.) Can this also from the period 01/01/2022 – 31/12/2022 or the latest 365-day period.
Please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in providing the response to your request and for any inconvenience this may have caused. Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Response: Please be advised that the requested information is not centrally recorded and is therefore not held in a readily retrievable format. Where you have requested the occurrence time of burglaries broken down by hourly intervals, and by specific week and day, burglary events that are not witnessed or captured on camera, cannot usually be recorded with a specific occurrence date or time. In such cases, the crime recording system allows for an ‘event’ (crime), to be recorded from the earliest date and time to the latest date and time from when the offence could have been committed. For example, if a victim left their property at 18:00 on 27th March 2022, and returned at 21:00hrs on 2nd April 2022, to find that they had been burgled, and there were no witnesses or other evidence to determine when the offence might have occurred, the event dates and times would be recorded as follows:
Event on / from date and time: 27/03/2022 at 18:01 hours
Event to date and time: 02/04/2022 at 20:59 hours.
In the above scenario, if we provide an hourly interval of between 18:00 and 19:00 (this being the earliest point that the offence could have occurred), this would not be accurate as the burglary could have occurred anytime within a 24-hour period over a number of dates. In addition, it is not possible to pinpoint a specific week and day for this offence occurrence. Furthermore, the business area has also advised that it is not mandatory to enter an event time, and so this field is often not completed by officers. However, where this is the case, the system will default the time stamp to 00:00 to 00:59. Due to these issues, in order to determine an accurate response to both parts of this request, it would be necessary to individually review each and every burglary offence. Only by locating those records where the specific date and time of the offence is known, can we provide an accurate hourly, weekly and day breakdown. The business area has advised that there have been over 2,200 burglary offences recorded for the specified period and, at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record to review, this would equate to in excess of 183 hours of work. Therefore, the work involved in locating and retrieving the information requested exceeds the cost threshold of £450, which equates to 18 hours work at a standard rate of £25 per hour, as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with section 12 (1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this request.
In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance; however, due to the number of records which would need to be individually reviewed, I am unable to suggest a way to reduce your current request into one which could be managed within the fees limit.
Although it will not accurately show the times and days that burglaries have occurred, it may be possible to provide data using the ‘Event from’ date and time field for burglary offences recorded in 2022. This can then be presented in the requested format. However, as previously stated, this will only refer to the earliest point that a burglary could have occurred and the start of an event period which could span days or even weeks. Should you wish to revise your request in this way, I must advise that, in regard to the hourly period 00:00 to 00:59, a sizable number of the results in this period will be due to the system defaulting where the time field has not been completed by officers and therefore this data will not be accurate.
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information provided is as accurate as possible.
Your attention is drawn to the below which details your right of complaint.
Should you have any further enquiries concerning this matter, please write or email the Freedom of Information Unit quoting the reference number above.
Yours sincerely
Freedom of Information Officer
Freedom of Information Unit
Warwickshire Police
PO Box 4
Leek Wootton
Warwickshire
CV35 7QB