FOI 10183-25 Assaults in JD Sports and Sports Direct

Request to Northamptonshire Police:

1) Please state for the calendar year 2024 how many of the following crimes were alleged to have occurred and were recorded by your force as happening in a) Sports Direct and b) JD Sports shops:

Assault offences to include all assault offences
5D – Assault with intent to cause serious harm
8N – Assault with injury
8P – Racially or religiously aggravated assault with injury
105A – Assault without injury
105B – Racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury

Please note I am only interested in assaults which involved members of the public assaulting employees of Sports Direct or JD Sports within store premises.
The data should be broken down by whether the assault happened in Sports Direct or JD Sports.

2) In addition, please provide me with a verbatim copy of the “investigation summary field” and/or the modus operandi (MO) for the 10 most recent cases. I understand these will have to be redacted to remove private information.

Response:

1)a) 2 b) 0
2) See below

Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires that, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) is to provide you the applicant with a notice which:

(a) States the fact,
(b) Specifies the exemption in question, and
(c) States (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.

The exemption applicable is:

Section 40(2) Personal Information

Section 40 is a class based absolute exemption and there is no requirement to consider the public interest in this case.

One of the main differences between the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act is that any information released under Freedom Of Information is released into the public domain, not just to the individual requesting the information. As such, any release that identifies an individual through releasing their personal data, even third party personal data, is exempted unless there is a strong public interest in its release. The public interest is not what interests the public but what benefits the community as a whole.

Personal data is defined under the Data Protection Act as data that is biographical in nature, has the applicant as its focus and/or affects the data subject’s privacy in his or her personal, professional or business life.

Principle a of Article 5(1) states that information must be processed fairly, lawfully and in a transparent manner. In this case the individuals would have a reasonable expectation that information would not be processed if it resulted in their identification, or equally led an individual to be wrongfully identified as a consequence. Risk increases where timescales are recent and numbers low.

Northamptonshire Police is also of the opinion that any individuals that provide information to the police in order for them to investigate criminal matters would expect that information to be held in confidence. There would be an expectation that such information will be treated confidentially and only shared with those that need to know professionally. Accordingly, Northamptonshire Police contends that disclosure of a verbatim copy of the "investigation summary field" and/or the modus operandi (MO) would be at variance with these expectations and thus unfair.