FOI 687/25
REQUEST
1) Please state for the calendar year 2024 how many of the following crimes were alleged to have occurred and were recorded by your force as happening in a) Sports Direct and b) JD Sports shops:
Assault offences to include all assault offences
5D – Assault with intent to cause serious harm
8N – Assault with injury
8P – Racially or religiously aggravated assault with injury
105A – Assault without injury
105B – Racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury
Please note I am only interested in assaults which involved members of the public assaulting employees of Sports Direct or JD Sports within store premises.
The data should be broken down by whether the assault happened in Sports Direct or JD Sports.
2) In addition, please provide me with a verbatim copy of the “investigation summary field” and/or the modus operandi (MO) for the 10 most recent cases. I understand these will have to be redacted to remove private information.
RESPONSE
Question 1
A search has been conducted for all crimes recorded under the following offence categories where ‘Sports Direct’ or ‘JD Sports’ was recorded within the ‘Building/Premises Name’ of the occurrence address between 1st January 2024 and 31st December 2024.
Offence Categories:
5D – Assault with intent to cause serious harm
8N – Assault with injury
8P – Racially or religiously aggravated assault with injury
105A – Assault without injury
105B – Racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury
Each occurrence has been individually interrogated on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS) in order to establish their relevance.
This search retrieved 3 results relating to JD Sports.
0 results were returned for Sports Direct.
Please be advised that this search has been conducted by crime date and not by the reported date. This means that any results brought back will relate to crimes recorded between 1st January 2024 and 31st December 2024 and not when the incidents were first reported. Therefore, results retrieved may contain incidents that were reported before 1st January 2024.
Please be advised, the results that come back are dependent on how the information has been entered onto the system. As such, the information provided should not be considered statistically accurate and/or definitive and therefore, care should be taken when using this data for any further statistical, analytical or evaluative purposes.
Question 2
Please see the attached document entitled ‘Response Data 687_25 - Q2’ that provides the information to answer the second part of your request.
In respect of the redacted information, your request has been considered and I am not obliged to provide you with the requested information.
In relation to your particular request, the following exemptions apply:
Section 40(2) Personal Information
Section 40(2) is a class based absolute exemption (apart from some limited circumstances). Therefore there is no requirement to consider the public interest test.
The Data Protection Act covers processing of personal data about a living individual. Personal data means data which relates to a living individual who can be identified-
(a) from those data, or
(b) from those data and other information which is in the possession of, or is likely to come into the possession of, the data controller or any other person in respect of the individual.
Information will “relate to” a person if it is about them, linked to them, has some biographical significance for them, is used to inform decisions affecting them, has them as its main focus or impacts on them in any way
The summaries usually consist of the content of the original call by a member of the public and includes specific level of detail as well as personal information relating to both the complainant and the suspect and the circumstances surrounding the report. If we disclosed all the redacted information this could lead to identification of an individual.
Disclosures made under the Freedom of Information Act are disclosures to the world at large. If we released this information into the public domain, there would be a clear breach of the first principle of the Data Protection Act which states that personal information must be processed fairly and lawfully.
This letter acts as a refusal notice for this part of your request.