FOI 10863-25 Sextortion and blackmail.

Request:

I'm writing to make an information request under the FOIA (2000). I'd like the following information in the easiest form:

1. Are you able to provide data for the Home Office Crime Code 035/00 (Blackmail) recorded by your force for the period 01/01/2014 to the most recent available
2. Are you then able to filter this data for the word "sextortion". Can you then provide the raw number broken down by month?

Police 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.

Searches conducted between 1st January 2014 & 16th June (inclusive) for all occurrences where stats class code is 035/00 Blackmail.To incorporate the sextortion aspect of the request MO Free Text searched for the keyword ‘SEXTORTION’.

Please be aware that keyword searches are problematic and in no way provide accurate results or figures. As with any keyword search, the search will only return exact matches, and will not take into account any differences in terminology and/or spelling used. If the selected key words have not been mentioned, the data will not be returned. Vice versa, if the key words have been mentioned in an unrelated context irrelevant data will be collected.

1)

2)

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. 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.

These figures may be subject to further investigation, reclassification and cancelling and may therefore change over time.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed, 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.