Crimes Occurring at Pharmacies or Chemists in 2021

Keywords

Pharmacies, Chemists, Premises, Chemist, Assaults, Violent, Arson, Incidents, Suspects, Armed, Weapons, Knife, Firearm, Hurt, Proceeding, Outcome, Charge, Caution.

Publication Number

PUB 1397

FOI Reference Number

16724

Request Title

Crimes Occurring at Pharmacies or Chemists in 2021

Date Range

01 January to 31 December 2021

Information Requested

I would like to request some information relating to crimes committed at pharmacies in the Essex area under the Freedom of Information Act. Please can you supply the following information:

1)  The total number of crimes that occurred at premises registered as a pharmacy (which may be termed as a “chemist” in location codes) between January 1 and December 31 2021

2)  How many assaults or violent crimes including arson were committed at a registered pharmacy between January 1 and December 31 2021?

3)  Please can you supply details of the incidents described in points 1 and 2, including:

a)  If suspects were believed to be armed (and details of suspected weapons, e.g. knife, firearm)

b)  whether anyone was hurt

c)  the number of people proceeded against in relation to these incidents, and the type of proceeding and outcome that took place (charge, caution, etc).

I would also be interested in any information held by your organisation regarding my request, including a breakdown of the number of different types of crime that occurred at a registered pharmacy between January 1 and December 31, 2021. I understand that I do not have to specify particular files or documents and that it is the department’s responsibility to provide the information that I require.

Disclosure with Exemptions

Full Refusal with Section 12 Exemption

Information Correct as at

N/A

Date of Disclosure

01 March 2022

Related Documents/Links

N/A

FOI 16724 Response

Having completed enquiries within Essex Police in respect of Section 1(1)(a), Essex Police does hold information relating to your request, however, the obligation of Section 1(1)(b) cannot be met as Essex Police does not hold all the information requested in a format that allows it to be retrieved within the time and cost limits of FOI.

When responding to a request for information under the terms of the FOIA, a public authority is not obliged to provide information if the authority estimates that the cost of the retrieval of the information requested would be in excess of £450 (equivalent to 18 hours work).  The costs criteria relates to a request in its entirety, which means that if we cannot retrieve all of the information requested within the costs limit, we are not obliged to retrieve any of the information requested.

Section 12(1) of the FOIA states that a public authority is not obliged to:

“…comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.”

The following explanation outlines the difficulty Essex Police has in answering your request:

Essex Police are unable to accurately extract the level of detail in relation to your request for the request period from our current systems.  Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not primarily for the production of statistical information for FOI responses.  The location type within our Crime system is not reliably used, therefore, we cannot extract data based on whether the location type is a pharmacy or chemist.  This request would entail manually extracting the requested data and then reviewing each investigation report one by one to establish if the premises was a pharmacy or chemist.  To establish if information is held would, therefore, exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would qualify as the creation of data as the results cannot be processed by means of purely sorting or filtering data sources or running a database query tool. There is no requirement under the act to create data purely to answer FOI requests.

Consequently, and to this extent, Essex Police are exempt from the duty to provide information you have requested under the provisions of Section 12(1) of the FOIA.  Therefore, and in accordance with Section 17(1) of the FOIA, this communication must act as a refusal notice to provide all of the information that could be interpreted as being captured by this part of your request.

Section 16(1) of the FOIA provides that a public authority is required to provide advice and assistance, Essex Police can confirm that a keyword search of the Modus Operandi (MO) Field could be undertaken for particular words if required i.e. ‘chemist’ or ‘pharmacy’, however, this would miss out some premises due to the naming convention.  Please note that any keyword search may not be entirely accurate and any results would not necessarily answer your submission, and, therefore, could be highly inaccurate and misleading.

For a keyword search to be undertaken, you would need to provide a list of keywords you would like searched.

Alternatively, if you could provide a list of high street chemists you would like us to look at then we can search the address details for these locations.

The intention of Section 16 is to provide assistance in resubmitting a valid request.  Please note that any advice and assistance under Section 16 regarding resubmission of a request does not indicate that resubmission will provide a full disclosure, each submission will be assessed and if a disclosure is deemed harmful, then the appropriate exemptions will apply.