Seizures of Dangerous & Banned Breed Dogs 2022
Keywords
Dogs, Seized, Control, Aggressive, Attacked, Dangerous, Destroyed, Banned, Breeds, Cost, Veterinary, Treatment.
Publication Number
PUB 1477
FOI Reference Number
17608
Request Title
Seizures of Dangerous & Banned Breed Dogs 2022
Date Range
2022
Information Requested
This is a new Freedom of Information request to try and get more comparable data, and to get updates on the 2022 data.
Please can I have data for questions 1-3 by calendar year, and data for question 4 by financial year?
Q1: The number of dogs seized by your force (dogs that are out of control, aggressive, have attacked someone or are considered dangerous) in 2022?
Q2: How many dogs have been put down/destroyed in 2022?
Q3: How many suspected banned breeds of dogs have been seized by your force in 2022? Do you have data for this question for 2019, 2020, and 2021? (I can see from your last reply that pre 2018 data is not easily extractable).
Q4: The annual cost (in financial years) to your force of kennels, veterinary treatment, and of putting down/destroying these dogs? In your last response you supplied data which said a typical annual cost for 2019/20 was £52,139. Would it be fair to assume a similar cost in 2018/19 and 2021/22. Or have you noticed increasing costs year on year? Is there any data on costs for 2022/23 thus far?
Disclosure with Exemptions
Full Refusal with Section 12 Exemption
Information Correct as at
12 October 2022
Date of Disclosure
13 October 2022
Related Documents/Links
Offences 008/21 & 008/22 - Dogs 2017 to 2022
Types of Dogs Seized by the Police for Being Dangerously Out of Control 2019 to 2021
Dangerous Dogs Seized 2017 to 2021
Seized Dogs June 2019 to May 2020
FOI 17608 Response
FOI Duty
First Duty – Essex Police holds some of the information relating to your request
Second Duty – See below
Fact - It is not possible to extract and verify all the data in your request
Exemption - Section 12(1)
Refusal - Section 17(5) of FOIA
Reasoning – In respect of Question 4, Essex Police are unable to report on the financial data required. As set out in the previous FOI disclosure, the Care of Dogs is contracted out and the data on Kennelling is not held in a central log, it is not therefore available in an extractable format.
Each Invoice for the Care of Dogs would need to be manually reviewed, as the Invoices include Kennelling but also include may include Veterinary fees and without examining each one to determine whether or not the precise cost of Kennelling was indicated and then this would mean creation of a report for data - which would take approximately 30 minutes per invoice / transaction line to establish the facts – this would take considerable resource to achieve and, therefore, is regarded as excessive and would exceed the time and cost limits under the Act.
Duty to assist – When refusing a request on cost (Section 12(1)/12(2), outside of the act and in effort to assist we can provide the following
Essex Police can report as follows:
Caveat: The data is correct as at 12/10/2022.
The following data report is taken from the previous FOI disclosure, which also has been updated today, to provide the most up to date data for Questions 1, 2, & 3 and again includes a copy of the links available for previous years data in respect of Question 3:
Question 1: The number of dogs seized:
2018 from October – 13
2019 - 74
2020 - 88
2021 - 49
2022 to end of September - 44
Question 2: The number of dogs seized under the Dangerous Dogs Act that were destroyed:
2018 from October - 6
2019 - 34
2020 - 33
2021 - 49
2022 to end of September - 53
Question 3:
The following link was shared under the previous FOI disclosure and is re-stated below – this link includes the data for 2019, 2020 & 2021:
Types of Dogs Seized by the Police for Being Dangerously Out of Control 2019 to 2021 | Essex Police
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.