FOI 694/25
REQUEST
- How many incidents of anti-social behaviour were reported to your force in the past four calendar years: 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021?
- Please break down the numbers of incidents reported during working hours - and out of hours.
- For each of those four years, what proportion of the calls led to a police officer visiting the scene of the incident.
- Please break down the numbers for incidents reported during working hours - and out of hours.
- For each of those four years, what was the average length of time it took a police officer to attend the scene of the incident?
- Please break down the numbers of incidents reported during working hours - and out of hours.
- What hours, on which days of the week, is your Out Of Hours anti-social behaviour reporting hotline currently answered by a human.
- How long, on average, does it take for calls to your Out Of Hours anti-social behaviour hotline to be answered by a human?
RESPONSE
Question 3
Your request for information has now been considered and I am not obliged to supply the information you have requested.
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires South Wales Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which:
(a) states that fact,
(b) specifies the exemption in question and
(c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.
In relation to your particular request, the following exemption applies:
Section 12 – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit.
The information in respect of question 3 of your request is not held in an easily retrievable format. Therefore, in order to accurately answer this part of your request, we would be required to individually interrogate each anti-social behaviour (ASB) occurrence on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS).
It has been established that a total of 136,844 ASB occurrences were recorded between 1st January 2021 and 31st December 2024.
We estimate that it would take approximately 3 minutes to manually interrogate each occurrence in order to ascertain whether a police officer visited the scene of the incident.
We therefore estimate that it would take in excess of 6,842 hours to answer this part of your request.
It is estimated that the cost of providing you with the information is above 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.
In the case of the police service, the appropriate limit is £450 which has been calculated to equate to a total of 18 hours of work.
If any part of the request exceeds the fees limit then Section 12 applies to the whole request.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a refusal notice.
Excess cost removes the forces obligation under the Freedom of Information Act, however under Section 16 – Duty to provide advice and assistance, an authority is required to offer an applicant the opportunity to redefine their request within the cost limit. If you were to remove question 3 then we may be able to assist with the rest of your request.
ASB is behaviour that can cause harassment, alarm or distress to individuals.
For further information on ASB and how to report an ASB incident, please see the below link:
Antisocial behaviour | South Wales Police