FOI 848-2023 / Sept 2023 / Burglaries

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 848-2023

I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 13^th September 2023 as follows:

Q1. For the crime of residential burglary, how many crimes included a visit to the property which was reported to have been burgled. Please supply the data for 2018-2022 inclusive and the overall number of residential burglaries reported in each year. If you cannot supply all years, please provide those which you can within the time limit.

Q2. Please provide a monthly breakdown for the number of burglaries recorded in January to August 2023 and the number which received visits from police officers.

Q3. If you are unable to provide data for question 1 and 2, please provide an explanation on how you are measuring the NPCC’s announcement on June 8th 2023 that all burglaries are now receiving a visit from a police officer

Link:

Police now attending scene of every home burglary (npcc.police.uk)

Q4. Please provide how many police officers attended a premise where shoplifting had been reported. Please supply the data for 2018-2022 inclusive and the overall number of shoplifting cases reported in each year. Please also provide a year to September figure for 2023.

Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.             

Response: Please be advised that some of the requested information is not centrally recorded and is therefore not held in a readily retrievable format. Regarding Q4, there is no field or marker within the crime system to record whether an officer has attended the scene. Therefore, to determine a response to this part of the request, it would be necessary to manually review each shoplifting offence, and potentially corresponding incident log, for the specified period. The business area has advised that there have been 13,895 shoplifting offences recorded between 2018 and 2022, as set out below:

At an estimate of 5 minutes per record to review, this would equate to 1157 hours of work for this part of the request alone. Therefore, the work involved in locating and retrieving the requested information 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 part of the request, and, if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit, then section 12 applies to the whole request.

In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to refining your request; however, due to the volume of records that would need to be manually reviewed, I am unable to suggest a way in which this part of the request could be revised to allow the requested information to be retrieved within the fees limit.  I can however advise that, regarding Q1 and Q2, mandatory attendance is required in circumstances where a burglary of a residential dwelling involves person(s) entering the property and item(s) being stolen.  However, allowing for anomalies, to provide a definitive figure in relation to the number of residential burglaries which were attended, it would be necessary to examine each investigation on an individual basis.  The work involved in carrying out this process therefore exceeds the cost threshold (£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.

Our records show that, following your previous request for information in 2022 (reference 428-2022), you were provided with the recorded crime figures for Residential Burglary for the period of 2018 to 2021.  It may therefore be possible to provide the same information for the period 1^st January 2022 to 31^st August 2023, should you wish to revise and resubmit your request. It may also be possible to provide information on the number of shoplifting offences recorded for 2023.

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

[email protected]