FOI Defibrillator Thefts (0455-2022/23)

Request

1. Since January 2017, how many reports have you received of defibrillators (AEDs) being stolen? Please break this down by year.
2. For each of these reports please provide the following information, if possible within the limits of the FOI act:
a. Date and general location (eg. town or village name) of the reported theft.
b. A description of the type of location the theft occurred from (eg. community setting, private business, medical setting, ambulance, etc.)

c. The outcome of each of these reports.
d. Was the stolen defib found and returned?

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 data retrieval process generally relies on computer generated reports which search for information held within specific fields within our crime recording system. Where information is held outside of these fields, the retrieval process is much more difficult. In this instance there is no specific field for a defibrillator therefore a manual review of all theft related crimes would be necessary to ascertain how many were in relation to the theft of such equipment. Doing this would exceed the time limit allowed 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). However, what we may be able to do is a free text search of all crime records. This would return all records where a defibrillator is mentioned. Depending entirely on the number of records returned, we may then be able to manually review those reports and return only the ones where a theft of such equipment has occurred. These searches and their results are to be handled with caution as the results rely entirely on the submitting officer entering the search terms exactly as requested and therefore may not provide an accurate picture.  If this is something you wish to proceed with, you will need to re-submit your request with the search terms you wish to use. 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.