FOI Metaverse Crimes (1020-2023/24)

Request

Q1. How many crimes on the metaverse have been reported to your force since 2021? By Metaverse, I mean a virtual-reality space in which users can interact within a computer-generated environment such as Meta’s game Horizon Worlds. If possible please can you detail the nature of the offence alleged, time of the reporting and decision in the case whether to investigate or not.

Response

Extent of Searches to Locate Information

Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police to locate relevant information. 

Decision

Your request for information below has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) we can neither confirm nor deny if North Yorkshire Police does or does not hold the information you have requested. It is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Section 12(2) allows a public authority to refuse a request where it estimates that it would exceed to appropriate limit to either comply with the request in its entirety or confirm or deny whether the requested information is held.

Due to the nature of our recording systems; the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. To establish if any information relevant to your request is held by North Yorkshire Police, a manual review of each crime report across the requested time frame would be required. It is not known whether the information retrieved, if possible, would be an accurate representation or reliable set of data.

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 “metaverse”. 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.