FOI 18347-25 - Racial and Religious Hate Crimes

 Request:

Please could you provide data on the number of incidents recorded as hate crimes, on a month by month basis, as per below:

1. Number of incidents flagged as race or religion hate crime, every month, within the last 24 months (each month from August 2023 to August 2025 inclusive).
2. If possible, what was the hate crime recorded as (e.g. islamophobia, antisemitism )
3. Where the victim's ethnicity and/or religion was recorded, what was the breakdown, by ethnicity and religion?
4. How many incidents resulted in injury? Please can this be broken down into level of injury caused (i.e. minor, serious, life-threatening etc.)

Response:

Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Northamptonshire Police, when refusing to provide information (because the information is exempt), 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

The exemption applicable to the information requested is:

Section 12(1) – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit

The information you are requesting is not held by Northamptonshire Police in any reasonably retrievable form. The only means of establishing information of the nature you are requesting would be by way of manual examination of each record. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer-run report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is usually required to retrieve that information. By way of further explanation, there is no dedicated field for recording whether an injury was sustained, nor for recording the injury level. The only way to establish whether injury occurred, and if so the injury level, would be to manually review each record.

It is my assessment that the cost of providing you with the information requested would exceed the 'appropriate level' as set out in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

My assessment is that it would cost 1914 (number of records) x 2 minutes each (minimum) = over 63 hours at £25 per hour to respond to your request, which exceeds the 'appropriate limit' (currently £450 for 'prescribed costs').

In view of the above, and in accordance with the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please take this letter as a Refusal Notice.

You may wish to refine and resubmit your request so that it reduces the costs shown above and is then within the 'appropriate limit'. For example, it may be possible to identify hate crimes causing injury within the limit if a smaller time frame were requested. If you would like some further information about how to proceed with your request then please contact:

[email protected]

Due to the different methods of recording information across 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.

Although excess cost removes the Force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill, I have supplied some information relevant to your request which was retrieved or available before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of your request.

Question 1:

Search for all occurrences with a National Incident Category List (NICL) qualifier of “Prejudice is Any” between 1^st August 2023 and 31^st August 2025. Data filtered to show Racial and Religious hate bias.

The data above reflects the number of occurrences. There may be more than one victim per occurrence. Equally, an individual may have been a victim in more than one occurrence.

The numerical data presented in this response is an unaudited snapshot of unpublished data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.

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.

If you decide to write an article/use the enclosed data, we 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.