FOI 10422-25 Dogs in hot cars

Request to Northamptonshire Police:

• The number of reported incidents relating to dogs being left in a hot vehicle AND/OR The number of animal cruelty incidents relating to dogs being left in a hot vehicle
• Any supplemental data the force has with regards to numbers of incidents of dogs left in hot vehicles in your jurisdiction.

The data should cover the years 2014-2025 broken down by month. Within this please include geographic information as well as the type of vehicle.

Response:

Please be advised that the Freedom Of Information Act relates to specific recorded information held by an authority and it is not for a public authority to assume what information the requester would like to receive. Requests for information that is not held in an electronically searchable or retrievable format have to be tasked out to individuals/departments/business owners to try and locate the relevant data and in order for the force to be able to know who to task the request out to, and for them to know what it is that they are trying to retrieve, if indeed it exists, the force will need to know what they are looking for.

Accordingly, your request for ‘Any supplemental data’ is currently too generic to establish what you refer to, if indeed any information exists and who the query should be routed to.

Searched all incidents reported from January 2014 to May 2025 for the keyword 'dog' and 'car' in the Incident Description and the words either 'heat' or 'hot'.

Crime searched for occurrences from January 2014 to May 2025 with a stats class code of 097/01/01 and the keyword 'dog' in the Occurrence Summary'.

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.

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.