FOI 22349-25 Domestic-abuse crimes and incidents

Request to Northamptonshire Police:

The (below) Freedom of Information (FOI) request sets out the specific data we are asking for. We fully appreciate that this information may be held by different teams, so please feel free to forward the request internally to your Safeguarding, Data & Analytics, or Public Health colleagues as appropriate.

Please provide for 1 Jan 2020 - 30 Sep 2025:

1. Police-recorded domestic-abuse crimes and incidents (by month and victim ethnicity - Black African, Black Caribbean, Mixed, others).
2. Where available, suspect/offender ethnicity for DA
3. Definitions and suppression
4. If not held, advise which agency

Where possible, please include any cases recorded as intentional self-harm or suicide where a domestic abuse flag or history was present.

Response:

Please note, for any information held by Public Health you will need to submit a request to them directly.

Searched for all DA flagged crimes and Domestic Incident Non-Crimes filtered to show victims and suspect/offender Self-defined ethnicity.

1. Crimes 

Non-Crimes 

Please note, the figures have been provided per victim & suspect/offender, NOT per occurrence as there can be more than 1 victim and more than 1 suspect/offender recorded on each.

Ethnicity will not be broken down by month due to some very low number which would risk identification. Please see S40(2) exemption below.

2. 

3. Northamptonshire Police do not use suppression

4. Information not held

Northamptonshire Police do not record self-harm in a searchable format. Data for suicides is provided by looking at all Sudden Deaths that contain Suicide in the MO or occurrence type description or the self-inflicted NICL qualifier applied. Searched for whether any of these have a Domestic qualifier and looked at associated occurrences that had a domestic qualifier applied. This produced 1 return.

Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires that, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) is to provide you the applicant with a notice which:

1. States that fact
2. Specifies the exemption(s) in question and
3. States (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption(s)

The information is exempt from disclosure by virtue of the following exemption:

Section 40(2) – Personal Information

Section 40 pertains to third party personal data. This would not be released under the Freedom Of Information Act unless there is a strong public interest. This is because any release would breach the Principles contained within Article 5(1) of the GDPR and Part 2 of the Data Protection Act 2018.

One of the main differences between the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act is that any information released under Freedom Of Information is released into the public domain, not just to the individual requesting the information. As such, any release that identifies an individual through releasing their personal data, even third party personal data, is exempted unless there is a strong public interest in its release. The public interest is not what interests the public but what benefits the community as a whole.

Personal data is defined under the Data Protection Act as data that is biographical in nature, has the applicant as its focus and/or affects the data subject’s privacy in his or her personal, professional or business life.

Principle a of Article 5(1) states that information must be processed fairly, lawfully and in a transparent manner. In this case the individuals would have a reasonable expectation that information would not be processed if it resulted in their identification, or equally led an individual to be wrongfully identified as a consequence.

Disclosures which appear harmless, pieced together with other disclosures can be used in a ‘mosaic effect’ to third parties who may have access to additional information that would enable them to link the requested information to an individual.

Freedom Of Information Act disclosures are to the world at large and will remain in the public domain indefinitely. Therefore, provision of this information would exceed the original Policing requirement for the processing of the information and would not be lawful or fair to the individuals in question.

It is for these reasons outlined above; that I feel the principle a would be breached by this disclosure and the Section 40 exemption remains in place. I am not obliged to consider any further principle in my arguments. This is an absolute, class-based exemption and, as such, there is no requirement to consider the public interest test.

The numerical data presented in this response is an un-audited snapshot of un-published data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that the data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when the data is used.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data, we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.