Blackmail Offences 2012-24
Request
I have been collecting data published by the government on the number of
blackmail offences (offence code: 35) recorded by police forces every financial
year from 2012/13 to 2023/24.
I am now looking for more information from each force about the ages
recorded for the victims in these cases.
South Yorkshire Police’s recorded blackmail offences for each of the years is
as follows:
12/13: 5
13/14: 11
14/15: 20
15/16: 41
16/17: 109
17/18: 160
18/19: 259
19/20: 255
20/21: 351
21/22: 446
22/23: 664
23/24: 822
Question:
-For each of the financial years since 2012/13, please could you break down the
ages recorded for victims of all of the blackmail offences recorded by the
force?
Please feel free to group ages. For instance, if there were 50 recorded
blackmail offences for one year you could then provide the ages in groups
such as: 5 aged 14; 5 aged 15; 10 aged 16; 20 aged 17; 10 aged 18 etc
Response
Section 12(1) - Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
For the data prior to 2018 - data is held on an historic system no longer in use and cannot be readily extracted. Manual reviews would be required to find the data within the system, bringing cost into play. Therefore, this data cannot be located or retrieved in a readily retrievable format within cost, and as such your request would trigger the s12 cost exemption.
However, to assist your request for the data 2018 to 2021 I approached our Crime Management Data Returns Administrator for assistance. The Connect System is used to record complaints or allegations of those matters, which the Home Officespecify should be recorded as ‘crime’.
All our systems are designed and used first and foremost for Policing Purposes and have limited search capability.
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:
Section 16
Under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, my duty to provide advice and assistance to anyone making a request for information.
Although excess cost removes the force's obligations under the Freedom of
Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill, I have supplied information, relative to your request, 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 fee’s
regulations for the remainder of your request neither does it bind South Yorkshire Police to any commitment that it will release information in such a manner in the future.
I approached our Performance Review Unit for assistance with your request. An
analyst within this unit has conducted a search of our Crime Management System - Connect which records complaints or allegations of those matters, which the Home Office specify should be recorded as 'crimes'. They provided me with the enclosed spreadsheet in response and the following explanation regarding their search criteria:
Criteria Used - Incident Created Date is between 01/04/2018 and 31/03/2024, SYP & crime only filter, HO Sub Sub Group Name is equal to / is in BLACKMAIL, Person Role is equal to / is in VICTIM
Please see attached spreadsheet - FOI2024/00383
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 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