Dog Attack Injury's 2020-2024

Request

1. The number of reported dog attacks (Home Office code 008/21 – owner or
person in charge allowing dog to be dangerously out of control in any place
in England or Wales injuring any person or assistance dog) for the
following dates:

• Feb 1 2020 – July 1 2020
• Feb 1 2021 – July 1 2021
• Feb 1 2022 – July 1 2022
• Feb 1 2023 – July 1 2023
• Feb 1 2024 – July 1 2024

2. Out of the total incidents for each year, please also provide the number that
involved a suspected American Bully XL (otherwise known as ‘XL Bully’)
and, separately again, the number that involved a confirmed American
Bully XL.

For example, for Feb 1 2020 – July 1 2020, total of 20 incidents with 4
involving a suspected XL Bully and 2 involving a confirmed XL Bully.

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:

a. states that fact,
b. specifies the exemption in question and
c. states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.

The following exemption applies to the disclosure of the information:

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

I approached the administrator for South Yorkshire Police’s Crime Management
System. They informed me that there would be thousands of incident comments, which would require reading and redacting any personal / data protected information.

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
offences. 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 longer than 18 hours’ work. There are 1,583 records that would need to be manually reviewed to provide this data and this process at a even 1 minute per incident would take over 26 hours, which greatly exceeding the recommended 18 hours’ time limit provided by Data Protection Appropriate Limit and Fees Regulations.

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 - Duty to Provide 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.

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.

We approached our Crime Management Data Returns Administrator for assistance with your request. The Connect System is used to record complaints or allegations of those matters, which the Home Office specify should be recorded as ‘crime’.

They provided us with the enclosed spreadsheet and the following explanation of their search criteria:

Criteria Used - SYP & crime only filter, HO Classification is equal to / is in 008/21, Incident Year No is equal to 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, Incident Month Name Short is equal to Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun.

1. Please see table below.

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.