FOI 0618-2024/25- Attacks on delivery couriers

Request:

Q1. The number of delivery couriers who were attacked during deliveries each year

Q2. The number of delivery couriers who were killed during deliveries each year

Q3. The number of delivery couriers who were victim of theft during deliveries each year

Q4. The number of delivery couriers who died during deliveries each year

Q5. The number of delivery couriers who were injured during deliveries each year

If possible/marked, these should include couriers working include Deliveroo, Just Eat Takeaway and Uber Eats. 

Please provide the data for the following years, separately, 2024 (year to date), 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019. If necessary so as not to exceed the cost/time limit, please refine this to 2024, 2023 and 2022, and solely provide the attacked and killed figures.

Response:

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 courier at the time that an offence was committed by conducting a manual read of each crime/incident record. This would involve reading through thousands 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). We 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 “delivery 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 rely 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. Please do not hesitate to contact me further to discuss or submit a new request.

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.