FOI 336/25

REQUEST

Under the FOI Act 2000, please provide me with the number of sheep reported stolen to the force, broken down into the following years: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

If there is time, please provide the outcome of each reported offence.

RESPONSE

Your request for information has now been considered and I am not obliged to supply the information you have requested.       

In relation to your request, the following exemption applies:

Section 12 – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit.

A search has been conducted on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS) for Theft and Handling offences within the requested time frame. This search retrieved 127, 254 results.

Please note, due to the way the information is held on the database, we would need to manually interrogate each occurrence to see if it is related to theft of a sheep.

We estimate that it would take approximately one minute to interrogate each occurrence to identify whether it is a duplicate or is related to theft of a sheep.

We therefore estimate it would take in excess of 424 hours for the one year alone.

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. We do not routinely carry out keyword searches as they are not reliable however If you were to request a keyword search of the word ‘sheep’ under the crime type theft and handling, we may be able to assist with your request. Please note, this 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.