FOI 22917-25 Electric vehicle charging points

Request to Northamptonshire Police:

I am writing to make a request about electric vehicle charging points under the Freedom of Information Act.

Please can you tell me for the calendar year to date how many incidents of a) theft and b) vandalism have been reported at EV charging points in your force area. Please specify if private (at someone's home) or public charging points.

Please provide the same information for 2024 and 2023. It seems to be that most thefts are of cables but please do not limit the search to that criteria.

Response:

Crime searched for all Theft and Criminal Damage Offences 1st January 2023 to 25/11/25/where the MO free text or the remarks section of the occurrence address mention any of the following key words: Electric vehicle charger, EV point, EV charging point, EV charging station, Electric vehicle charging station, Electric vehicle station or Cable.

As with any keyword search, the search will only return exact matches. This does not account for differences in terminology and/or spelling used. Keyword searches are problematic and in no way provide accurate results or figures. If the selected key words have not been mentioned the data will not be returned.

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.