FOI 11796-25 Squatting

Request to Northamptonshire Police:

For 2024:
1. How many instances of squatting reported to your police force..
a. In residential properties/ land
b. In commercial properties/ land

For 2023:
1. How many instances of squatting reported to your police force..
a. In residential properties/ land
b. In commercial properties/ land

For 2022:
1. How many instances of squatting reported to your police force..
a. In residential properties/ land
b. In commercial properties/ land

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.

Our incident recording system does not have a category for squatting or recording residential/commercial property.

Searched all incidents where description mentioned keyword 'squat' for the years between 2022-2024 inclusive.

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. Vice versa, if the key words have been mentioned in an unrelated context irrelevant data will be collected.

2022 = 55
2023 = 59
2024 = 56

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.

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.