Lost/Stolen/Recovered Laptops

Reference number: 
20110446
Request date: 
08/2011
Response date: 
23/08/2011 (All day)
Request details: 

1)            How many laptops have been reported lost or stolen in the past 5 years? (broken down year by year if possible)

2)            How many lost or stolen laptops have been recovered by your authority in the past 5 years? (broken down year by year if possible)

3)            How many lost or stolen laptops have been returned to their owner in the past 5 years? (broken down year by year if possible)

4)            How many laptops have been stolen in the past 5 years? (broken down year by year if possible)

a.            House

b.            Public transport

c.             Offices

d.            Assault

e.            Cars/other vehicles

Exemptions Applied: 

S12 - Cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit

SYP response: 

Information regarding ‘lost’ items is not held in a single, searchable electronic system.  If a member of the public were to report that they had lost a laptop (or other item), this would be done at an Enquiry desk and staff would complete a paper record of the loss.  The individual reporting the loss is given a reference number.  Therefore, in order to address your question of lost laptops, a search would have to be done by District Staff based on the enquiry desk, and it would be necessary to look at each individual paper record to ascertain what was reported lost.  This would be a time consuming process as, in the first 6 months of 2010, Sheffield district took 4322 reports of lost property. We can therefore expect to be looking through in the region of 40,000 records for the past five years for this particular district.  With a very conservative estimate of five seconds per record to locate, retrieve and read through, this equates to 30 hours of work for Sheffield District - this exceeds the Appropriate Limit.  There are three other districts within the Force area.