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Women, Fallen, Heights, Died, Falling, Height, Seriously, Injured, Charged, Deaths, Men, Injuries, Convicted, Domestic, Abuse, Markers, Names, Locations.
PUB 1387
16694
Information Regarding Women who have Fallen from Heights 2016 to 2022
01 January 2016 to 28 January 2022
I'm looking to find information about women who have fallen from heights. Please may you provide me with the following information:
How many women per year have died from falling from a height between 01-01-2016 and 28-01-2022?
How many women per year have been seriously injured from falling from a height between 01-01-2016 and 28-01-2022?
How many people were charged in relation to the deaths? How many of those people were men?
How many people were charged in relation to the serious injuries? How many of those people were men?
How many people were convicted in relation to the deaths?
How many people were convicted in relation to the serious injuries?
How many victims had domestic abuse markers against their names?
A) In relation to the deaths.
B) In relation to the serious injuries.
What locations did the women fall from e.g. did they fall from a tower block, a bridge, a carpark, a cliff?
Full Refusal with Section 12 Exemption
N/A
18 February 2022
N/A
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 requested 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.
This request would entail manually extracting the requested data and then reviewing each case one by one in order to identify whether or not falling from a height was a factor.
In addition, Essex Police do not record conviction data on the Athena Custody system (this is held by the Crown Prosecution Service). This request would 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.
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 Initial Modus Operandi (MO) Field on the Athena Crime system could be undertaken if required. However, 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.
Charged Outcomes of Arrests could also 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.