FOI 19810-25 Spiking Incidents Jan to Oct 25

Request to Northamptonshire Police

Please could you provide the relevant information for the period between 1 January 2025 until 1 October 2025.

For each report concerning drink spiking, please could you provide the following:

1. A monthly breakdown of the numbers of drink spiking reports filed.
2. The age group of the person who filed the drink spiking report, categorised as follows: 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50, 51-60, 61+.
3. The gender of the person who filed the

Response

Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 places two duties on public authorities. Unless exemptions apply, the first duty at Section1(1)(a) is to confirm or deny whether the information specified in a request is held.

The second duty at Section1(1)(b) is to disclose information that has been confirmed as being held.

When refusing to provide such information, because the information is exempt, Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Northamptonshire Police to provide the applicant with a notice which:

• states that fact,
• specifies the exemption in question and
• states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption I can advise that the requested information is held; however, the information is not suitable for disclosure in the requested format.

The exemption applicable in this case is Section 40(2) Personal Information.

Section 40 is an absolute class-based exemption, which does not require evidence of the harm disclosure would cause and does not require consideration of a public interest test. That being said, where Section 40(2) is engaged, in order to make the exemption absolute there needs to be evidence that a Data Protection Principle would be breached by disclosure.

This exemption is engaged where disclosure of information relates to personal data of a third party or could lead to the identification of an individual, either from that information alone or combined with any other information from within the Police Service or public domain. In this case, due to extremely low numbers, providing the requested breakdown by age range and gender is likely to lead to the identification of an individual. Such a disclosure would breach individuals’ rights under the Data Protection Act 2018, in particular Article 5(1) of the GDPR which states that personal data shall be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject.

This letter serves as a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act for the requested breakdown. Instead, a total monthly figure has been provided across the specified period. Please see the information I am able to provide set out below, where information was sourced using search terms: -

‘Spiking’, ‘Kaylon’, ‘kalon’, ‘drink lacing’, ‘drink laced’ and ‘spike’.

However, keyword searches are problematic and in no way provide accurate results or figures. As with any keyword search, the search will only return exact matches and will not take into account any differences in terminology and/or spelling used.

Each Modus Operandi (MO) has been manually read to make sure it fulfils the criteria of the request, and to ensure that unrelated offences are excluded, for example, a suspect has spiked hair, or a metal spiked fence has been damaged.

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.

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.

If you decide to write an article or 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.