FOI 6353-25 In-school knife-crime incidents
Request:
Please could you provide a list of the annual number of in-school knife-related incidents that police from your force have attended, for the last three years (2022, 2023, 2024), as well as a year-so-far number for 2025?
Response:
Northamptonshire Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the production of statistical information for Freedom Of Information responses.
Northamptonshire Police records ‘Incidents’ from requests from members of the public requiring police assistance. These requests for assistance may be made via 101/999 or online submissions via the Northamptonshire Police website. Not all incident reports generate a crime report, and not all crime reports come from an incident report.
Our crimes and incidents database are separate recording systems and record different information. Officer attendance is recorded on the incident database in a searchable field. The incident number is manually recorded within the crime record but if the format is not correct it cannot be identified by running a report.
You should also note, although a location may be been logged as a school, it does not mean that every incident relates to that school. The information provided could include incidents reported by the school or near the school both during and outside school hours.
Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Northamptonshire 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.
The exemption applicable to the information requested is:
Section 12(1) – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
The information you are requesting is not held by Northamptonshire Police in any reasonably retrievable form. The only means of establishing information of the nature you are requesting would be by way of manual examination of each knife crime record to see if officers attended. 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 usually required to retrieve that information.
It is my assessment that the cost of providing you with the information requested would exceed the 'appropriate level' as set out in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
My assessment is that it would cost 2,050 (approximate number of records) x 3 minutes each (minimum) = over 102 hours at £25 per hour to respond to your request, which exceeds the 'appropriate limit' (currently £450 for 'prescribed costs').
In view of the above, and in accordance with the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please take this letter as a Refusal Notice.
You may wish to refine and resubmit your request so that it reduces the costs shown above and is then within the 'appropriate limit' shown above. (I cannot think of a means to refine the request in order to provide the information you are seeking) but if you would like some further information about how to proceed with your request then please contact:
Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason, responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.