FOI Harassment Crimes (348-2024/25)

Request

Q1. Between April 2014 and April 2024, how many offences were recorded under section 2a of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997?

Q2. Between April 2014 and April 2024, How many offences were recorded under section 4a of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997?

Q3. Between April 2014 and April 2024, how many offences were recorded under section 2a and later revised to section 4a of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997?

Response

Extent and Result of Searches to Locate Information

To locate the information relevant to your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by North Yorkshire Police.  

Decision

I have today decided to disclose the located information to you.

Q1 & Q2. Please see the table below which details the number of offences recorded by North Yorkshire Police under section 2a and section 4a of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 from 01 April 2014 to 22 July 2024, broken down by finbancial year and offence type.

Q3. I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt. I have however decided to disclose the located information for Q1 & Q2 to you as a gesture of goodwill.

Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer ran report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is required to retrieve that information.

Whether a crime was recorded as 2a and later changed to 4a is not recorded in such a way that can be extracted automatically. In order to retrieve the requested information, it would be necessary to manually review all crimes to determine which, if any are relevant to your request. This would involve thousands of reports which would exceed the time limit allowed under the Act. 

Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.

Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data.  It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.