Murder Offences 2022/2023

Request

1. How many reports of murder offences (home office code – 001/01, murder of persons aged 1 yr or over) have you received from January 1st, 2022, to January 1st, 2024?

2.Please can you also provide the age, ethnicity and gender of the victim for each of these reported offences?

3.Please can you also provide the cause of death of the murder, i.e. stabbed with a knife?

4.Please can you provide the outcome for each of these murder offences that have been reported between the set dates?

Response

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'. All our systems are designed and usedfirst and foremost for Policing Purposes and have limited search capability. They provided me with the enclosed spreadsheet in response and the following explanation regarding their search criteria:

Please see attached spreadsheet - FOI2024/00555. 

Criteria used – SYP & crime only filter and Incident Created Date is between 01/01/2022 and 01/01/2024 and HO classification is equal to / is in 001/01

Please note - 

• This is a count of the Home Office offence code 001/01 (Murder of persons aged
  1 year or over), recorded on CONNECT crime between 01-JAN-2022 and 01-
  JAN-2024.
• A breakdown by the victims age at the time of the incident has been provided along with a further breakdown by the victims gender, ethnicity and the offence outcome.
• Extracted on 02/10/2024. Data from CONNECT crime only. This is a live recording system and may be subject to change.

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.