FOI 8049-25 - Foraging picking plants

Request:

Please provide the relevant information for the period between 1 April 2022 and the most recent date for which data is available.

Please could you provide the following:

The number of reports made to your force about foraging or picking of plants. Please could you provide the following breakdown:

a. A yearly breakdown of the number of reports made about foraging or picking of plants.

b. The approximate location (for example: name of the park or road) at which the foraging or picking of plants allegedly took place.

c. Whether the report of foraging or picking of plants led to a charge.

d. The names of the offences under which these charges were made.

e. The number of these charges which proceeded to conviction.

If you need to carry out a key terms search to locate these records, please include the terms “foraged”, “foraging”, “wild food”, “forager”, “wild ingredients”. If you would document these cases in another way, please include these results as per the spirit of my request.

Response:

All Occurrences and Incidents between April 2022 and 23 April 2025. Then filtered by Occurrence Summary, 'Log Text' for keyword terms “foraged”, “foraging”, “wild food”, “forager”, “wild ingredients” and property label description for 'PLANTS'.

1a. 

b. 

c.

d. N/A – no occurrences led to a charge.

e. N/A – Although conviction data is not held by Northamptonshire Police (it is held by HMCTS), no occurrences led to a charge therefore no occurrences could proceed to conviction.

As with any keyword search, the search will only return exact matches within the Incident Description or Crime MO. 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.

Please note that this information was correct at the date of receipt of the request. Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. 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.

The numerical data presented in this response is an unaudited snapshot of unpublished data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.

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.

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. 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 or use the enclosed data, we 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.