Mobile Phone Theft Data Sep 25-Mar 26

Your request details

1. The number of arrests made for offences related to mobile phone theft between 1 September 2025 and 1 March 2026.
2. Of the arrests made, the number of suspects recorded as being on bail for outstanding charges when the alleged offending took place.
3. The number of charges brought for offences related to mobile phone theft between 1 September 2025 and 1 March 2026.
4. The number of people charged with offences related to mobile phone theft between 1 September 2025 and 1 March 2026.
   
5. The greatest number of charges against a single person relating to mobile phone theft in this period.

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 12(1) Where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit

We hold information that falls under the scope of your request. However, locating/retrieving/extracting the information would exceed the cost limit set out by section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

Reasons for applying exemption 12(1)

I approached the Performance Review Unit. The initial search of this system returned over 1700 Incident reports regarding arrests relating to mobile phone thefts. We do not have a reason for arrest that is specifically related to “mobile phone theft”. As a result, the circumstance of arrest, for records that match the following criteria, they would need to be reviewed in order to determine which are relevant to your request. As the data you are requesting is not recorded in an easily retrievable format and to provide the level of data you require would require a manual review of all the records. At a conservative 5 mins per incident this process would take over 141 hrs.

In essence, we would have to review and manually check all relevant incidents to extract the level of detail of the cases that met the criteria of your request; this process would take much longer than 18 hours' work.

The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 provide that the cost limit for non-central government public authorities is £450. This must be calculated at the rate of £25 per hour, providing an effective time limit of 18 hours.

Guidance from the Information Commissioner to public authorities is that where one part of a request is reasonably estimated to exceed the appropriate limit then the authority is not obliged to consider or comply with the remainder of the request up to the point at which the appropriate limit has been reached. Please note point 30 of the below link:

https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf

Section 16: Providing advice and assistance

Under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, my duty to provide advice and assistance to anyone making a request for information.

Due to the fact we do not have an arrest reason for mobile phone thefts and manual review of records will have to be done, we advise reducing your time frame significantly.