FOI 830-2025 / Aug 2025 / Sexual offences
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 830-2025
I write in connection with the request for information, which was received on 8th August 2025 from Predator Hunters as follows:
Sexual Offences Handling & Registered Offender Counts (9 Aug 2020 – 8 Aug 2025)
Please treat this as a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
Scope / time period:
Please provide the information requested below for the five-year period up to and including today: from 9 August 2020 to 8 August 2025 inclusive. Where you hold data by calendar or financial year, please provide a yearly breakdown for: 2020 (partial: from 9 Aug 2020), 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 (partial: to 8 Aug 2025). For every item below, break down results by year and by victim age group: Child (under 18 at date of report) and Adult (18 and over at date of report). Please also include a total for the whole period.
If a dataset field cannot be produced exactly as requested, please provide the nearest equivalent exportable data (e.g., internal category codes) and explain the difference.
Section A — Child victims warned they could be subject to criminal investigation/arrest
Q1. For incidents involving a child victim, the number of occasions where police informed the child or child family that they themselves could be subject to criminal investigation or arrest under the Sexual Offences Act where the other party was an adult. Provide counts by year (as defined above) If you record whether this occurred in writing or verbally, please include that breakdown.
Section B — Victim updates released before formal notification
Q2. The number of cases where police released public updates or press statements about a suspect’s remand, charge, sentence, or release before the victim (adult or child) had been formally notified. Provide counts broken down by:
Year (as above).
Victim age group (adult / child).
Type of update (e.g., remand/charge, court appearance, sentencing, release from custody).
Section C — Family / parental arrests or interviews arising from Complaints
Q3. For reports where the victim was a child and where police action involved arrest or formal interview of a parent or immediate family member arising from complaints by (a) the police, or (b) the alleged predator, please provide (counts by year):
Number of parents/family members arrested.
Number of parents/family members formally charged.
Number of parents/family members convicted.
Number of parents/family members released without charge.
Please indicate whether the original victim was a child or adult for each count.
Q4. Repeat the counts in (3) for cases where the victim was an adult.
(If your systems do not link “parent/family member” to incidents directly, provide the nearest available proxy — e.g., arrests linked to the same incident ID — and explain the method used.)
Section D — Outcomes for sexual offences reports
Q5. For all crime reports recorded under the Sexual Offences Act in the period, provide counts by year and by victim age (adult / child) for each outcome category at case closure or finalisation:
No further action (NFA) / no prosecution.
Released pending further investigation (i.e., not charged at initial decision).
Charged (formal charge applied).
Convicted (court conviction recorded).
Found not guilty / acquitted.
Section E — Additional counts requested (to expose poor practice)
Q6. Number of occasions where a victim (adult or child) was informed that they might be treated as a suspect in the same investigation (counts by year and victim age).
Q7. Number of occasions where the police recorded an internal investigation or misconduct review relating to handling of sexual offence allegations (counts by year; indicate whether linked to adult or child victim).
Q8. Number of occasions where external bodies (CPS, IOPC, Local Authority Safeguarding) were notified about concerns relating to police handling of sexual offence cases (by year and victim age).
Section F — Registered sex offenders (on / off the register), proximity to schools / parks, and town-level counts
Q9. For each year in the period, provide the following aggregate counts for persons resident in the area your force manages (do not provide any names, addresses, or other personally-identifiable information):
- Number currently subject to notification requirements (on-register) under the Sex Offenders Act or equivalent who were resident in the force area on the snapshot date for that year.
- Number no longer on the register (previously required to notify but removed lawfully) who were resident in the force area on the snapshot date for that year.
- For the populations in (a) and (b) separately, the number whose registered/residential address is located within a three-minute walk of:
Any school;
Any public park or playground;
Either a school or a park (combined).
- For all counts in (a), (b), and (c), also provide a breakdown by town (or equivalent local administrative area / policing district used in your published crime statistics). If exact “town” boundaries are not recorded, use the nearest equivalent spatial category available (e.g., beat area, sector, neighbourhood policing team boundary).
Q10. For the proximity counts in 9(c), please also provide a short methodology statement for each year specifying:
Snapshot date used for the count (e.g., 8 Aug of each year or your local snapshot date).
Whether you used registered/residential address or last known address.
The distance definition used for “3-minute walk” (e.g., pedestrian network walk-time calculation or straight-line buffer in metres) and, if metres, the radius used. If a walk-time model was used, state the data source (e.g., Ordnance Survey, local authority walkway data) or routing algorithm.
Any exclusions or caveats (e.g., suppressed addresses, sheltered housing exclusions, definition of school sites).
Privacy note: only aggregate counts are requested. Where any town-level count would be fewer than 5 individuals, please merge into an “<5 / suppressed” category to protect privacy.
Definitions & notes for clarity
Sexual Offences Act: use your force’s local crime-recording tags /NCRS/IMPACT categories that constitute sexual offences. If you use different classification, please provide a mapping.
Victim age: classify by victim age at date of report (child = under 18; adult = 18+).
Arrest / charged / convicted: use force operational records. If conviction data is held by courts and not in force systems, please indicate that and provide what you can.
“Informed” the child: include any instance where police explicitly told a child or the guardian of the child that the child could be investigated/charged, whether verbally or in writing.
Town boundaries: if you publish standard tables by town/sector/beat, please use those published categories and indicate the category name used.
Format and delivery (cost reduction)
To assist in keeping this request within the Section 12 cost limit, the information may be provided in any reasonable aggregated form, including: A simple plain text table in the email body or a .txt file; A CSV or Excel spreadsheet; or A clearly structured Word or PDF document containing tables.
I do not require extraction into a specific database export format if that would increase time or cost. If a category cannot be broken down exactly as specified, please provide the nearest available aggregated count and note the difference.
Priority / cost-limit fallback
If full compliance would exceed the Section 12 cost limit, please supply the following in priority order first:
- Section D (Outcomes for sexual offences reports).
- Section F (Registered offender counts and methodology).
- Section A (Child victims warned they may be investigated/arrested).
- Section B (Victim updates released before formal notification).
If you cannot comply fully, please confirm which sections you will provide and an estimate of cost/time for the remainder.
Public interest & follow-ups
This request is made in the public interest to improve transparency and safeguarding practice in the handling of sexual offence allegations and the management of registered offenders. If you hold de-identified example incident IDs or redacted case summaries illustrating the categories above (e.g., examples of notifications to victims preceding public updates), a small number of redacted examples would be helpful.
Further clarification:
We would like to clarify the definitions used in our request:
A child is defined legally as anyone under the age of 16, and an adult is anyone aged 16 or over—unless the Sexual Offences Act classifies them differently.
Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Response: Please be advised that with regards to Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, Q6 and Q8, the requested information is not held in a readily retrievable format. In order to determine responses to these elements of the request, it would require an exhaustive manual review of the wider documentation for each and every sexual offence investigation recorded in the specified period on an individual basis. As you will appreciate, a manual review on this scale would take an inordinate amount of time and would be above the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e., the cost of locating and retrieving the requested information, exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ 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 these parts of the request, and, if any part of a request exceeds the fees limit, then section 12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance on refining your request; however, due to the volume of records that would need to be individually reviewed, I am unable to suggest a way to reduce these parts of the request into ones that could be managed within the fees limit.
With regards to Q5, I can advise that it may be possible, within the fees limit, to conduct searches for all offences classified by the Home Office as ‘Sexual Offences’ and provide separate breakdowns of these by year, victim age group (child/adult), and crime outcome types, should you wish to revise and resubmit your request. However, please note that crime outcomes will only reflect the most serious outcome for any suspect attached to a crime, i.e, where there are multiple suspects attached to an investigation, the outcome would not take into account ‘lesser’ or ‘like’ outcomes of any other suspect(s). For further information on crime outcome types please see the below link:
With regards to any court outcomes including convictions, not guilty results and acquittals, this information falls within the remit of, and is held by, HM Courts & Tribunal Services (HMCTS). You may therefore wish to contact them in regard to these elements of the request.
Furthermore, it may be possible to conduct searches for Q7 within the fees limit, however, this would be entirely dependent on the number of records that would need to be reviewed on an individual basis and how long it would take to review each one. Therefore, should you wish to resubmit Q7, please be mindful that there is a possibility that this may still exceed the fees limit. Further, in the event that information is retrievable within the cost threshold, this would be subject to the usual disclosure considerations.
Regarding Q9, please find links below to the annual Warwickshire Mappa reports that are available in the public domain for the period 2019 to 2024. These provide the number of Mappa-eligible individuals each period, including the number with notification requirements.
Finally, please be advised that regarding Q9c, Q9d, and Q10, the requested information is not held. The FOI Act only extends to requests for recorded information and does not require public authorities to answer questions if this would mean creating new information.
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