Reports of 'Big Cats' 2023 to present

Request details

Details of all the reports to South Yorkshire Police of 'big cats'  from 2023  to present day.

I would be grateful for information on reports of big cat, panther, wild cats in South Yorkshire that have been made to the police.

I would like to know the location (nearest road perhaps?), the time and date, and what was spotted and put on the log.

Response

Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires South Yorkshire Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt), to provide you the applicant with a notice which:

1. states that fact,
2. specifies the exemption in question and
3. states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.

The following exemption(s) apply to the disclosure of the information:

Exemption applied - Section 40(2) Personal Information

This is an absolute exemption and therefore a Public Interest Test is not relevant.

Reasons for applying exemption 40(2)

Section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act exempts information if it constitutes the personal data of any individual and disclosure would breach Data Protection principles. The term 'personal data' refers to information relating to a living individual who can be identified, either directly or indirectly. This can include obvious identifiers such as a name, or information which, when combined with other data, could enable an individual to be identified.

Due to the request relating to disclosing the road name, date and time, and the low numbers involved, disclosure of requested detail could potentially lead to the identification of individuals. This would constitute a breach of the data protection principles and is therefore exempt under Section 40(2).

I approached the administrator for South Yorkshire Police's Incident Management System. The Smart system records the majority of calls to South Yorkshire Police requiring the specific deployment of police resources, whether reported by members of the public via 999 or 101 or 'happened upon' by officers and staff in the course of their duties. The log runs as a running commentary of an incident as it unfolds and has limited search capability.

As there is no generic incident title that meets the criteria of your request, our administrator initially searched for incidents where the keyword ‘big cat’ and “wild cat” is mentioned within the free text boxes of the incident log. The analyst also advised the following free text word had also been attempted:

‘panther’

With this in mind, I am prepared to disclose the data below which will not compromise the personal information of any person(s) involved and restrict any possibility of identifying individuals.

There were 2 reports in 2024: one in Doncaster described as a big cat and the other in Barnsley described as a panther.

Please note, every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that data has been extracted from data sources used by this force for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording systems and information assets.

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/data for any requests may have limitations, and this should be taken into account when those data sets are used.

Police forces do not use generic systems or identical procedures for capturing the data. For these reasons this response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with responses you may receive from other police forces.