FOI Crimes Involving Couriers (0671-2024/25)
Request
1. How many crimes have been recorded where the victim's occupation was logged as 'Courier', 'Deliveryman', 'Delivery driver' or 'van delivery agent' between 2019 and 2024? Please note that if you do not use these specific terms, I am satisfied with any results where the victim is stated as being a delivery worker.
Please break the results down by:
1a) Month (e.g. January 2019, February 2019, etc).
1b) Victim occupation term
1c) The crime committed (for example: robbery, violence with injury, violence without injury, etc.)
1d) Location
- In how many of these cases was a suspect arrested? Please again break this down by the categories stated above.
- If possible and within the time and cost limit afforded to a search, please provide the incident report for each case.
Extent of Searches to Locate Information
Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police to locate relevant information.
Decision
I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt.
Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer ran report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is usually required to retrieve that information.
A victim’s occupation is not always recorded as it is not always relevant to the offence being investigated. In addition, one person may have more than 1 occupation recorded on police systems and it is only possible to establish if a victim was a delivery worker at the time that an offence was committed by conducting a manual read of each crime/incident record. This would involve reading hundreds of reports which would exceed the time limit under the Act.
Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.
Pursuant to Section 16 of the Act I am required to offer you advice and assistance with regarding to refining your request to within the ‘appropriate limit’ (time/cost limit). I may be able to provide you with the number of incidents within a specified time frame where key words are recorded in the MO Summary field, for example “Courier” or “Delivery driver”. You would be required to provide a list of Key Words for us to search upon. However, the accuracy of these results relies on an Officer recording the specific words in the field and it is likely that further manual reads would be required in order to ensure the results fit to your request (i.e. person working at the time of the incident). Due to the above I do not feel that results would be reliable.
Alternatively, if you wish to resubmit your request, omitting Question 1b) then I may be able to reconsider your request. Please note that further exemptions are likely to apply to Question 3 and therefore, you may also wish to reconsider this part of your request. If you wish to discuss this, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.