Dog Attacks 2020-24

Request

Q1. How many dog attacks have been reported to South Yorkshire Police in each of the following years: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024?

Q2. How many of these attacks resulted in someone being injured?

Q3. How many of these resulted in the dog involved being destroyed?

Q4. How many of these incidents resulted in the owner being convicted?

Q5. If possible, do you have any information on the breed of dog responsible for the attack and would you be able to provide us with this information if so?

Response

Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).

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 exemptions apply 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. Our systems are used first and foremost for policing purposes and have limited search capability. The initial search of this system with returned over 3300 Incident reports regarding dog attacks resulting in injury. 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 4 mins per incident this process would take over 220hrs.

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.

Additionally, we do not readily record the breed of dog, needing further manual review, potentially on a separate system. This would compound the time taken as described above.

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 fees 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’. I also approached our Facilities Team with your request. All our systems are designed and used first and foremost for Policing Purposes and have limited search capability. They provided me with the following data and explanation regarding their search criteria:

1. We don’t record count of injuries, so I have based the search on the three offences listed as these are assaults with injury.

Criteria Used - Incident Created Date is between 01/01/2020 and 31/07/2024, SYP & crime only filter, Full Offence Title is equal to Assault with Injury - Owner or person in charge allowing dog to enter a non-public place and injure any person, Owner or person in charge allowing dog to be dangerously out of control in a public place injuring any person, Owner or person in charge allowing dog to be dangerously out of control in any place in England or Wales (whether or not a public place) injuring any person or assistance dog

2. As per the offence title, it may not necessarily where someone is injured as it can be an assistance dog too. See above exemption.

4. South Yorkshire Police does not record conviction data. This information may be available from the Ministry of Justice. You may want to approach the CPS directly regarding this enquiry: https://www.cps.gov.uk/freedom-information

5. See above exemption.

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.