FOI 1123-25 Dog attacks

Request:

1. How many dog attacks were reported to your force throughout the whole of 2023? If possible, can this data be split by month? If not, an overall annual total is fine.

2. How many dog attacks were reported to your force throughout the whole of 2024? Again, a monthly breakdown would be nice but is not a dealbreaker.

3. For both 2023 and 2024, can you list the top 5 dogs involved in reported dog attacks, and – if possible – note how many reports related to these dogs.

Response:

Crime searched between 1st January 2023 & 31st December 2024 for all occurrences whereby Home Office code is 008/21

Please note, breed is not a mandatory field and often not known or recorded. Of the 1,277 reports 1,117 are unknown/not recorded therefore data on ‘top 5’ is likely to be inaccurate.

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.