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FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: FOI-582-2024
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 19th June 2024 as follows:
Q1. In the period of Jan 2022 to Jan 2024, how many sexual assaults were reported to you by passengers of taxis, of all types (a car with a driver who you pay to take you where you want to go) Including drivers of vehicle that subsequently turned out not to be taxis, the important distinction being that the complainant believed that the vehicle was a taxi at the time the alleged assault took place.
Q2. How many taxi drivers reported physical or verbal abuse from customers?
Q3. How many taxi drivers reported customers making off without paying.
Please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in providing the response to your request and for any inconvenience that this may have caused you. Please find the Warwickshire police response set out below.
Response: Please be advised that the requested information is not available in a readily retrievable format. Although there is an occupation field within the Crime Recording System, this is a drop-down field with limited choice, is not mandatory and is often not completed. Further, if the field has been completed it is not linked to an individual crime, but to a person, and can be added to at any time. Previous information is kept on the person record when new occupation details are added. Therefore, a search for individuals with a specific occupation type would return all records in relation to that individual, regardless of when the occupation was recorded or whether it had subsequently changed. Even where the relevant occupation is returned in any given search, it would be necessary to determine, in each case, whether the occupation was relevant to the specific crime in question and, in the event that an individual had been both a victim and a suspect of crime at different times, it would be necessary to determine which role was relevant to an occupation at the time of the offence relevant to this request. For these reasons, the occupation field is not a reliable search option.
Further, keyword searches are not carried out routinely as they are not reliable, they will only bring back records where the chosen keyword(s) is present within the MO Description / Incident Summary of an investigation; these are limited free text fields and do not contain all information in relation to an investigation.
Therefore, for these reasons, in order to provide an accurate response to your request it would be necessary to individually review the wider investigation documentation for each and every crime falling under offence types captured by the request. As you will appreciate, for a two year period this would equate to an inordinate amount of records and the work involved in determining the requested information would excessively exceed the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e., the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’, as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. For Police forces in the UK, the ‘appropriate limit’ is up to 18 hours (£450) of work on one request.
Although the limitations of a keyword search and the issues involved in a search on occupation, have been set out above, as a gesture of goodwill an analyst did undertake searches for offences recorded between 1st January 2022 and 31st December 2023 (inclusive) as follows:
This returned 59 results.
In an attempt to reduce the number of results and identify the most relevant Home Office Codes relating to assault of a constable/emergency worker and stalking and controlling and coercive behaviour offences: 8T, 8S, 104 8Q and 8U were removed.
This returned 888 results.
This returned 334 results.
Those searches produced 1281 records; however, even if we were to limit the search to these records based on the keyword searches and where the occupation field has been completed (albeit that the information could not be considered accurate), it would still be necessary to individually examine each and every one to determine whether the occupation is relevant to an individual being a victim or suspect at the time of the crime and relevant to a crime recorded during the stated period and also to determine the relevance of the presence of the keyword. It is estimated that such searches would take a minimum of 4 minutes per record which would still equate to in excess of 85 hours of work.
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.
Under Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance; however, given the amount of work involved, I am unable to suggest a way that you could reasonably pare down your request into one which could be handled within the time allowed unless you were to reduce your request to, say, Q1 only based on the keyword search (however, please note that this would not be considered an accurate response for reasons already set out above).
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