01/FOI/26/007819/Z - Vehicle-enabled crime against business premises, ATMs and EV charge points

Request:

I am writing to request the following information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, for each calendar year 2021–2025, or financial years 2021/22–2025/26 if that is how the data is held (please state which basis is used). Counts based on the date on which the offence was recorded are acceptable.

This request is for aggregate counts only, drawn from your crime recording system. No manual review of individual crime records or case files is required. For the purposes of this request, "structured code" means a structured modus operandi (MO), method-of-entry, attack-method, asset-type, or equivalent recording code.

(a) Vehicle-enabled crime against business/commercial premises — please provide, separately:

(i) The number of recorded Burglary (Business and Community) offences where a structured code indicates a vehicle was used to breach the premises; and

(ii) The number of recorded Robbery of Business Property offences where a structured code indicates a vehicle was used to breach the premises.

If your system cannot readily separate these two classifications, a single combined count for (a) is acceptable, provided you state that the figure is combined. 

Where a structured premises- or asset-type code allows retail premises to be identified separately, please also provide the retail-premises subset. If no such distinction can readily be made, the broader business/commercial premises count is acceptable, provided the scope of the figure is stated. 

(b) ATM-targeted crime: the number of recorded offences, under whichever classification your force uses to record attacks on automatic teller machines (e.g. Theft, Burglary, Criminal Damage or Robbery of Business Property, as applicable), where a structured code indicates that a vehicle was used — whether to breach the premises, to physically attack the ATM, or to remove or attempt to remove it. 

(c) EV charging infrastructure: the number of recorded Criminal Damage offences where a structured code indicates damage to an electric vehicle charge point caused by vehicle impact. If this cannot be identified from structured codes without reviewing individual records, please state that this information is not retrievable from structured fields. No alternative or keyword-based figure is requested for this part. 

(d) Only where the information requested in (a) and/or (b) cannot be retrieved using structured codes, please instead provide, for each year, the number of distinct recorded offences returned by a free-text search of MO fields, crime notes or equivalent searchable fields for one or more of the following terms: "ram raid", "ram-raid", "ramraid", "rammed the shutter", "rammed the door", "drove through the shopfront", "drove through the shop front", "vehicles used to gain access" and "vehicles used in the commission of the crime". If your system cannot de-duplicate records matching more than one search term, raw hit counts by term are acceptable, provided you clearly state that records may be counted more than once. No manual validation or review of the returned records is requested, and I accept that the results may contain false positives or incidents outside the intended scope, provided that limitation is clearly stated in your response. If searching all fields would exceed the cost limit, a search of the MO/method field alone is acceptable. A single combined count covering both (a) and (b) is acceptable where the search cannot distinguish between them. 

If the estimated cost of complying with the request as a whole would exceed the appropriate limit under Section 12, please treat the following as my preferred refinement of the request, to the extent necessary to bring it within the limit: first (a), then (b), then the free-text search in (d), and finally (c), and, within each element, the most recent years first. If further refinement is required, I would welcome advice and assistance under Section 16 before the request is refused.

Response:

Humberside Police can confirm we do hold the information you requested.

Please note, the information you request is not easily searchable and not held in structured fields. Therefore, we are only able to provide data in respect of question (d). by free text searching. The MO is not a ‘structured code’, it is a free text area. Therefore, we used free text searching for the keywords above, and also ‘EV charging’, ‘EV chargers’, ‘Cash machines’, ‘Cash points’ and ‘ATMS’.

Please also note that the results below are where the keywords appear in the MO only, should they not appear in the MO, they are not counted in the data below. Therefore, please treat the results with caution.

Data is also not broken down yearly, due to the low numbers if broken down it may lead to personal identification and trigger an exemption (Section 40).

Please note that police forces in the United Kingdom are routinely required to provide information and statistics to government bodies and the recording criteria is set nationally. However, the systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. It should be noted that for these reasons this force’s response to your questions should not be used for the comparison purposes with any other response you may receive.