Thefts from Care Homes 2018 to 2021

Keywords

Thefts, Care, Homes, Nursing, Residential, Elderly, People, Adults, Learning, Disabilities, Stolen, Value, Age, Gender, Victim, Charged, Convicted, Employee.

Publication Number

PUB 1215

FOI Reference Number

15910

Request Title

Thefts from Care Homes

Date Range

2018-2021

Information Requested

I am looking for information about reported thefts in care homes.  For the purposes of searches, care homes should be taken to include facilities including nursing and residential homes for elderly people but also homes that look after adults with learning disabilities.

Please could you provide me with the following:

1. How many thefts have been reported to the Police in care homes over the last three and a half calendar years (up to and including June 2021)?  Please could you break this information down year by year (2018, 2019, 2020 and the first six months of 2021) and, if possible, month-by-month.

2. In each case where a theft has been reported, please could you state what was stolen - what type of item, money etc - and the value, if recorded, of what was reported stolen, as well as a date for when it was reported stolen.  Please could you also state the age and the gender of the alleged victim in each case.

For each year, please could you provide a total for the value of items/money reported stolen was. I would be grateful if this information could be provided in list form: date, what was stolen/value, age/gender of victim.

3. In each case where a theft has been reported, please could you detail whether an individual was charged with a crime/if they were convicted or cleared. If possible, please can detail whether the person charged with the theft was an employee of the care home or not - the latter can be categorised as “other”.

Disclosure with Exemptions

Full Refusal with Section 12 and 17 Exemptions.

Information Correct as at

07 July 2021

Date of Disclosure

28 July 2021

Related Documents/Links

N/A

FOI 15910 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 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.  The location type within our Crime system is not reliably used.  We also cannot apply a proxy location search such as with schools because care homes are unlikely to include a common word or phrase within the location text.  This request would entail manually extracting the requested data and then reviewing each investigation report one by one to establish if this terminology is included within the file.  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 general theft, burglary and robbery statistics with outcomes i.e. whether Charged, Summonsed, Postal Requisition, etc can be provided if required – please see below notes:

House Burglary defined as "Burglary - Residential" and "Burglary - Dwelling" (change in definition during 2017)

Total Burglary defined as "Burglary - Residential; "Burglary - Dwelling"; "Burglary - Business and Community" and "Burglary - Non Domestic"

Robbery defined as "Robbery - Personal" and "Robbery - Business".

Essex Police do not record conviction data, this is held by the Crown Prosecution Service.

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.

If you do require further information a new request will need to be submitted and the request will be dealt with accordingly.