Hate Crimes - Chinese - 2019 to 2021
Keywords
Month, Breakdown, Racist, Hate, Crimes, Incidents, Chinese, Individuals, Category, Japanese, South, East, Asian.
Publication Number
PUB 1378
FOI Reference Number
16278
Request Title
Hate Crimes - Chinese - 2019 to 2021
Date Range
2019 to 2021
Information Requested
Would you be able to provide me with a month by month breakdown of racist hate crimes and incidents against only Chinese individuals over the same three year period please. 2019 to 2021
Disclosure with Exemptions
Full Refusal with Section 12 Exemption
Information Correct as at
N/A
Date of Disclosure
10 January 2022
Related Documents/Links
FOI 16278 Response
In respect of your enquiry
Would you be able to provide me with a month by month breakdown of racist hate crimes and incidents against only Chinese individuals over the same three year period please. 2019 to 2021
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 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. This request would entail manually extracting the requested data and then reviewing each case one by one to establish if the victim was Chinese if held as only the category of “Chinese, Japanese, Or Any Other South East Asian” is recorded on our system, we cannot break this down any further. 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 Race Hate Crimes for the category “Chinese, Japanese, Or Any Other South East Asian” can be provided if required.
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.