FOI 603/25
REQUEST
I would like to request the following information as a freedom of information request.
By ‘paedophile hunter’ I mean a group of people or individual who gather their own evidence of alleged paedophiles.
- In how many cases was the evidence provided by ‘paedophile hunters’ admissible as evidence for each of the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024?
- How many people were charged because of evidence supplied to the police from ‘paedophile hunters’ in each of the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024?
- In how many cases were the evidence not admissible for each of the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024?
- How many cases resulted in a mistrial because of evidence submitted from a ‘paedophile hunter’ for each of the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024?
- What percentage of cases of the crime of meeting a child following sexual grooming involved evidence from a ‘pedophile hunter’ for each of the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024?
RESPONSE
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.
At South Wales Police we monitor and collate statistical data on crimes, incidents and other data relevant to our daily business. The predominant purpose of this is to identifying pattern and trends, so resource allocation and policies can be managed to ensure public safety.
The data you have requested is not routinely collated in the format that would easily answer your query. Between 1st January 2020 and 31st December 2024, there were in excess of 22,781 crimes recorded under the offence categories overleaf.
17A Sexual Assault on a Male aged 13 and over
17B Sexual Assault on a Male Child under 13
19C Rape of a Female aged 16 and over
19D Rape of a Female Child under 16
19E Rape of a Female Child under 13
19F Rape of a Male aged 16 and over
19G Rape of a Male Child under 16
19H Rape of a Male Child under 13
19J Rape of a female - multiple undefined offenders
19K Rape of a male - multiple undefined offenders
20A Sexual Assault on a Female aged 13 or over
20B Sexual Assault on a Female Child under 13
21 Sexual Activity involving a Child under 13
22A Causing Sexual Activity without Consent
22B Sexual Activity involving a Child under 16
23 Incest or Familial Sexual Offences
24 Exploitation of Prostitution
27 Soliciting for the purpose of prostitution
70 Sexual Activity etc. with a Person with a Mental Disorder
71 Abuse of Children through Sexual Exploitation
73 Abuse of Position of Trust of a Sexual Nature
86 Obscene Publications etc
88A Sexual Grooming
88C Other Miscellaneous Sexual Offences
88D Unnatural Sexual Offences
88E Exposure and Voyeurism
Therefore, to accurately answer your request, we would be required to individually interrogate each occurrence on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS) in order to establish if the victim was under 18 and if ‘paedophile hunters’ were involved. We estimate that this would take approximately 5 – 10 minutes per occurrence. We therefore estimate that it would take in excess of 1,898 hours to answer 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. Unfortunately, due to the way in which the data is recorded, we can see no feasible way in which you could refine your request.
Whilst we do not routinely conduct keyword searches due to the inaccuracies of the figures these searches retrieve, if the applicant specifically asks for keyword searches to be conducted and provides keywords for us to search on, we may be able to assist.