Fraud / Economic Crime - Officers Complaints Investigations & Prosecutions - 2010, 2015, 2021
Keywords
Fraud, Economic, Crime, Officers, Complaints, Investigations, Prosecutions, Assigned, Squad, Command, Department, Referrals, SECU, HR, Workforce, NFIB, Dashboard, Offence.
Publication Number
PUB 1360
FOI Reference Number
16625
Request Title
Fraud / Economic Crime - Officers Complaints Investigations & Prosecutions - 2010, 2015, 2021
Date Range
2010, 2015 and 2021
Information Requested
1. The number of police officers currently assigned to your fraud squad or economic crime command/department and the number of officers assigned to that fraud squad or economic crime command/department in calendar 2015 and 2010.
2. The number of fraud complaints or referrals received in calendar 2021, 2015 and 2010.
3. The number of fraud investigations begun in calendar 2021, 2015 and 2010.
4. The number of current fraud investigations.
5. The number of current fraud prosecutions in which the force is involved and the number of such fraud prosecutions begun in 2021.
Disclosure with Exemptions
Full Refusal with Section 12 Exemption
Information Correct as at
01 November 2021
Date of Disclosure
17 January 2021
Related Documents/Links
N/A
FOI 16625 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 extract all of the data in relation to Question 1 of your request as the current HR System has been in place since 2013 therefore data prior to this period is unavailable.
Essex Police are also unable to accurately extract the level of detail in relation to Questions 2, 3, 4 & 5 of your request 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. Essex Police do not record crime figures for fraud. Recorded crime figures for fraud are recorded and collected by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB), which sits alongside Action Fraud. Some crimes are referred back to Essex Police for investigation, however, prior to January 2021, our Crime Recording System did not include a field that would allow us to identify the specific type of fraud offence to be able to provide a breakdown. This request would entail manually extracting all crime records for the requested three periods and then reviewing each case one by one to establish if it meets the criteria.
In addition, we do not record conviction data on the Athena Custody system (this is held by the Crown Prosecution Service). This request would also entail manually extracting the requested data, manually reviewing each record one by one to establish if there was a charge and then cross referring on the Police National Computer (PNC) to establish the outcome and conviction data.
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.
Having said that and in an effort to assist, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the FOIA, Essex Police can confirm some information in respect of Question 1 with the following data on staffing levels:
Caveat: The statements and data are correct as at 01/11/2021.
Question 1
The current HR System has been in place since 2013 therefore data prior to this period is unavailable.
Data provided is based on Financial Years which is in line with our home office reporting.
There are various teams within the Serious Economic Crime Unit (SECU) that deal with fraud investigations.
Headcount as at 01/04/2013 – 9
Headcount as at 31/03/2015 – 9
Headcount as at 31/03/2021 – 19
Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from a number of sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.
In an effort to assist under Section 16 of the FOIA, you may find the following link to related requests of interest:
General Police Workforce data for England and Wales Police can be found via the below link and includes data up to 31 March 2021:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/police-workforce-england-and-wales
The data tables contain the following:
• Police Officers by Force area, including rank, gender and ethnicity breakdowns, promotions, joiners, leavers, length of service, Police Objective Analysis (POA) functions, long-term sick leave and long-term absence.
• Police Staff by Force area, including gender breakdown, joiners, leavers, POA functions.
• Police Community Support Officers by Force area, including gender breakdown, joiners, leavers, POA functions.
• Special Constables by Force area, including gender breakdown, joiners and leavers.
Further ethnic breakdowns for England and Wales Police by Region and Force area can be found via the below link and includes data up to 31 March 2020:
Further Workforce data at Force level can be found via the Essex Police Statutory Duty Information Reports – please see below link to the 2021 Report:
Section 16(1) of the FOIA provides that a public authority is required to provide advice and assistance, Essex Police can confirm that for statistics prior to January 2021, the Crime Recording System did not include a field that would allow us to identify the specific type of Fraud Offence to be able to provide a breakdown. Since the beginning of 2021, the Fraud Team have either been adding Keywords/Tags to Fraud Crimes, therefore, we may be able to identify the specific type of Fraud Offence to be able to provide a breakdown.
The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) Fraud and Cyber Crime Dashboard is Fraud reported that occurred in Essex. The dashboard is the total Fraud Crimes reported for Essex (but not collated by Essex Police) – please see below link:
Dashboard FINAL VERSION (arcgis.com)
This reporting occurs at a national level via the Action Fraud Service. The NFIB then disseminate some of those crimes to Essex Police for investigation. We can only provide statistics for Fraud Crimes that have been allocated and investigated by Essex Police.
ONS figures also provide figures collated by Action Fraud and NFIB collate data for the UK as a whole, based on victims' postcodes as no information is available on where offences take place (which is often hard to define). For a small proportion of these offences the victim's police force area is unknown, these are also included in the total for England & Wales figures. Offences referred to the NFIB by UK Finance do not (in most cases) have any information on the location of the victim. UK Finance figures are derived for England and Wales using an adjustment based on the geographic distribution of offences referred by Cifas – Table 5 and notes 5A.
Crime in England and Wales: Appendix tables - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)
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.
You may also find the below links of interest:
https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/
https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/what-is-national-fraud-intelligence-bureau
https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/a-z-of-fraud