"Out of control dogs" 2021-24

Request

1. How many offences of out-of-control dogs causing injury to a person in the last 3 years? (From April 6 - April 5 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24) Broken down by; year, number of offences, breed of dog, severity of injury including fatalities and police action taken.

2. How many unregistered prohibited dogs have been seized in the last 3 years? (From April 6 - April 5 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24)

2a) How many owners have been reprimanded for unregistered prohibited dogs? Broken down by no. of dogs, breed and police action taken.

Response

Our data is 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 exemption applies to the disclosure of the information:

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

For Q1, I 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’.

We can locate and extract details for this question for Offence counts and their Outcomes. However, breed and severity of injury is not readily extractable without manually reviewing each Offence record. In this instance there are over 2400 records that would have to be reviewed.

Therefore, in order to locate the data, we would have to individually assess over 2400 Offence records, at a conservative 3 minute per record this equates to over 120hrs. This would exceed the time limit / cost for the purposes of the FOI Act.

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

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.

Q1 - The Data Returns Administrator has provided the following explanation of their search criteria and the attached data.

Criteria Used - Incident Created Date is between 06/04/2021 and 05/04/2024, SYP & crime only filter, Full Offence Title is equal to / is in 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

Q2 – No Information Held. - We don’t check if the dogs are unregistered that would be DEFRA it would be up to the dog owner to provide us with that information.

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