FOI 348/25

REQUEST 

What were the total number of dog theft crimes in the calendar year 2019 (with a monthly breakdown)?

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.

The information requested is not recorded in an easily retrievable format. A search has been conducted on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS) for Theft and Handling offences withing the requested time frame. This retrieved 30,279 results.

We estimate that it would take approximately one minute to interrogate each occurrence to identify whether it is relating to dog theft.

We therefore estimate it would take in excess of 505 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. If you were to request a keyword search of the word dog on theft & handling offences, we may be able to assist with this request.

Please note, keyword searches are not carried out by SWP 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 of an investigation; these are limited free text fields and do not contain all information in relation to an investigation.