FOI 5541-25 Knife offences at schools

Request to Northamptonshire Police:

Q1: For the years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 and 2024 the number of offences involving a knife committed at schools?

Q2: For the years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 and 2024 the number of offences involving a knife at school broken down by offence subgroup as per the Home Office counting rules?

Q3: For the years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 and 2024 the number of suspects for offences involving a knife committed at schools broken down by age and sex of the suspect?

Q4: For the years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 and 2024 involving a knife committed at schools broken down by how the suspect knows the victim?

Q5: For the years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 and 2024 the number of suspects for offences involving a knife committed at schools broken down by age and sex of the victim?

Q6: For the questions above, what method did you use to filter offences down to those committed at schools?

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.

Q1: 2020=20, 2021=21, 2022=33, 2023=29, 2024=28

Q2:

Q3: An offence can have more than one suspect

Ages have been grouped to reduce the risk of identification, see S40(2) below

Q4: Relationship is not a mandatory field

Q5: Information provided for victim. Possession offences invariably do not have a victim.

Ages have been grouped to reduce the risk of identification, see S40(2) below.

Q6: Searched all knife offences which have location as educational settings (school, college or academy). Any offences under the offence groupings 'violence against the person', 'possession of weapons' for the years 2020 - 2024 inclusive.

Please note, although the location has been logged as a school, it does not mean that every incident relates to that school. The information provided could include incidents reported by the school or near the school both during and outside school hours.

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:

1. States that fact
2. Specifies the exemption(s) in question and
3. States (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption(s)

The information is exempt from disclosure by virtue of the following exemption:

Section 40(2) – Personal Information

Section 40 pertains to third party personal data. This would not be released under the Freedom Of Information Act unless there is a strong public interest. This is because any release would breach the Principles contained within Article 5(1) of the GDPR and Part 2 of the Data Protection Act 2018.

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.

Disclosures which appear harmless, pieced together with other disclosures can be used in a ‘mosaic effect’ to third parties who may have access to additional information that would enable them to link the requested information to an individual.

Freedom Of Information Act disclosures are to the world at large and will remain in the public domain indefinitely. Therefore, provision of this information would exceed the original Policing requirement for the processing of the information and would not be lawful or fair to the individuals in question.

It is for these reasons outlined above; that I feel the principle a would be breached by this disclosure and the Section 40 exemption remains in place. I am not obliged to consider any further principle in my arguments. This is an absolute, class-based exemption and, as such, there is no requirement to consider the public interest test.

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.