FOI 8112-25 High value Lego thefts
Request to Northamptonshire Police
I am writing under the FOI Act to request records of high-value (over £500 in value) retail thefts involving Lego products since January 2020.
More specifically:
- The number of recorded shoplifting and burglary offences where "Lego" is explicitly mentioned in police reports, broken down by year? - i.e. for the whole of 2020, the whole of 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and in 2025 so far?
- A breakdown of locations where Lego thefts were reported, specifying where they occurred?
- The total estimated value of stolen Lego items in recorded incidents, where
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.
All theft Offences between 2020-01 and 2025-04 returned by Crime Tree Level 4. They have then been filtered on the ‘summary’ and ‘property label description’ for search of keyword 'LEGO' and ‘Property Current Vale’ = £500 or more.
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.
‘Property current value’ is not a mandatory field. 2020 = 1, Northampton Central, £900
2023 = 1, Daventry, £30,000 (stolen from lorry trailer)
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.
Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason, responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.