FOI 877-2025 / Aug 2025 / Thefts
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 877-2025
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 22nd August 2025 as follows:
I would like the following, please:
The number of thefts logged by your force which include the terms 'copper' 'electric' 'charger' 'car' in the summary of the offence for the year to date
Please provide the figure for each of the following years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020
As you can tell, I am aiming to collect data on the number of thefts of copper from car charging units, both public and privately owned, to see if there has been a rise.
On 28th August 2025 we requested the following clarification:
Please can you advise, where you ask for keyword searches to be undertaken within the summary of the offence (we interpret this to be the MO description / Incident summary fields), are you requesting where all of those words appear together, or where any one word or combination of words appear? I would advise that in the event that it is any word, the word ‘car’ is likely to return a high volume of records, and it is likely that reviewing those to ascertain whether they are relevant to the request may exceed the fees limit of 18 hours. With this in mind, unless your request was indeed referring to all four words being present together, you may wish to consider combinations of words such as, for example, ‘copper and car’, ‘copper and charger’ etc.
It is also important to note that 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 fields of an investigation. These are limited free text fields and, even if relevant, the keyword may not be present within those fields. Therefore, any information that may be retrievable in relation to your request could not be assumed to be an accurate representation and would have to be treated with caution.
On 28th August 2025 you advised:
Please search all the terms at once.
On 29th August we requested further clarification as follows:
Please can I confirm that you are asking us to conduct searches to identify crimes of theft where all four terms ('copper', 'electric', 'charger', and 'car') appear together within a single MO description / Incident summary field?
On 29th August 2025 you advised:
Yes, that's correct
Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Response: A search of the Crime Recording System was conducted using the following criteria:
- All crimes classified under Home Office Primary Offence Group ‘Theft’ containing all four keywords (copper, electric, charger, and car) in the Incident Summary / MO Description field, recorded between 1st January 2020 and 31st December 2024.
I can advise that this search did not return any results.
However, it is important to note that, in the event there are relevant offences recorded, but where all the requested keywords are not present within the Incident Summary / MO Description field, then these will not have been located from this search. For this reason, information retrieved by way of a keyword search cannot be considered to be entirely reliable.
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