Reports with specific terms data (ghosts etc) August 2019-Present

Request

1. The number of reported incidents received by your police force from
members of the public or your own officers that involve the following terms
in their descriptions or classifications:

• Ghosts
• Demons
• Monsters
• Paranormal phenomena
• Supernatural entities
• Poltergeists
• Apparitions
• UFO's
• Aliens
• Other similar terms associated with paranormal or supernatural activity

2. The time period I am requesting covers the past five years, from August
2019 to August 2024

3. For each relevant report, where possible, please include:

• The date of the report
• A brief description of the incident (redacted to remove personal
identifying information)
• The location (e.g., city, town) but also in more detail such as train station
(e.g. Kings Cross), hospital, police station, school, prison, church,
forest, hotel, historic homes, lighthouse, theatre, mosque, library,
museum, derelict buildings house, shop, airport, underground, factory,
graveyard, morgue - of the reported incident.
• Any outcomes or actions taken in response to the report

If the information is available in electronic format, I would prefer to receive it by
email in an Excel spreadsheet format.

Response

We 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.

If you require the crime incidents as opposed to the “number of reported incidents” then you would be required to complete another request detailing this. However, I have interpreted your request to be what is provided in the attached spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, there is no tag or qualifier that South Yorkshire Police use to identify these types of incidents so the results for ‘word search’ came back with thousands of incidents per year and the majority of these had nothing to do with your request e.g., theft of ‘Alien’ perfumes or referring to a place as a ‘ghost town’ or a person being described as a ‘monster’.

To get a better idea of the volumes, I have filtered the results to suspicious incidents only which has reduced the volumes considerably. I have then manually reviewed these to ensure that the words are being used in the correct context and are redacted.

Please see attached spreadsheet - 24.011429. 

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.