Registered Sex Offenders in Essex Police Area 2019-2020

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Keywords

Sex, Offenders, Registered, RSO’s, Force, Constabulary, Area, Community, Custody, Missing, Name, Change, Travelling, Abroad, Calendar Years

Publication Number

PUB 1198

FOI Reference Number

15710

Request Title

Registered Sex Offenders in Essex Police Area

Date Range

2019-2020

Information Requested

From Jan 2019 to Dec2019

From Jan 2020 To Dec 2020

1) How many sex offenders are registered in your constabulary area?

2) How many sex offenders are missing?

3) How many sex offenders have notified the force of a name change?

4) How many sex offenders have notified the force they are travelling abroad?

5) How many police officers are allocated to management of sex offenders?

Disclosure with Exemptions

Part Disclosure with Section 12(1) Exemption

Information Correct as at

20 May 2021

Date of Disclosure

27 May 2021

FOI 15710 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:

In relation to Questions 3 and 4, 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 current nominal data and then reviewing over 2000 nominal records one by one to identify previous nominals to establish if the information is held. 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 the following:

Caveat: The data is correct as at 20 May 2021.

1. How many Sex Offenders are registered in your constabulary area?

As of 31 December 2019 – 1607.

As of 31 December 2020- 1736.

This data is based on those in the community only and not those in custody.

2. How many Sex Offenders are missing?

There are currently 8 Registered Sex Offenders missing.

5. How many Police Officers are allocated to management of sex offenders?

There are currently 16 Police Officers allocated to the management of Registered Sex Offenders. However, it should be noted that Police Officers from other teams may be brought in to assist as and when required.

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.

The Force Information Management Board, chaired by the Deputy Chief Constable has oversight of the Force wide programme of work to improve the quality of Force data. This work has identified data quality leads in all key areas of the business including the Crime and Public Protection Command. Liaison between the Force Data Quality Team and the Crime and Public Protection Command lead for data quality will identify and resolve issues through a variety of mechanisms to ensure regular and appropriate supervisory oversight.

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