Offences of assault in Sports Direct and JD Sports stores in 2022

Freedom of information request reference no: 01.FOI.23.028246

I note you seek access to the following information:

Please state for the calendar year 2022 how many of the following crimes were alleged to have occurred and were recorded by your force as happening in
a) Sports Direct and
b) JD Sports shops:

Assault offences to include all assault offences
5D - Assault with intent to cause serious harm
8N - Assault with injury
8P - Racially or religiously aggravated assault with injury
105A - Assault without injury
105B - Racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury

Please note I am only interested in assaults which involved members of the
public assaulting employees of Sports Direct or JD Sports within store
premises.

The data should be broken down by whether the assault happened in Sports Direct or JD Sports.

In addition, please provide me with a verbatim copy of the "investigation summary field" and/or the modus operandi (MO) for the ten most recent cases. I understand these will have to be redacted to remove private information.”

Decision

I have today decided to disclose some of the requested information. Some data has been withheld as it is exempt from disclosure and therefore this response serves as a Refusal Notice under Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act) by virtue of the following exemptions:

Section 30(1)(a)(i) – Investigations and Proceedings conducted by Public Authorities
Section 40(2)(3A)(a) – Personal Information

Reason for decision

You have requested the investigation summary logs of the ten most recent cases. We would consider this to be a request for the free text ‘details’ pages of the relevant CRIS reports. These case ‘logs’ contain detailed information regarding the victims, suspects, witnesses, as well as details of the actions undertaken by the officer/s responsible for investigating the crime. Therefore, these logs are littered with the personal details of all those involved.

Although I note you have acknowledged that these would need to be redacted to remove personal information, it may still be possible to identify either the victim(s), witness(s) or suspect(s) in each case, especially considering the offence and location are already known and the fact that these would be the most recent cases chronologically.

Further to this, these case logs have been created and are held solely for the purpose of an investigation to ascertain whether a person should be charged with an offence.

Section 30(1)(a)(i) - Investigations and Proceedings conducted by Public Authorities - A case log is created and maintained to keep track of the progress of an investigation into whether a crime has been committed and if it has, then the case log will have any progress on evidence gathering and progress on the potential prosecution of a suspect. Also, regardless of whether a suspect is charged or not and convicted or not, case logs are retained for various reasons, including potential appeals, investigation reviews and potential re opening of investigations.

A case log can contain details of the potential crime, copies of victim and witness statements, interview transcripts, actions taken by the officer in the case (OIC) as well as any actions requested by the OIC’s supervising officer to progress the case. Any information contained in the case logs will have been given by victims, witnesses and suspects for the case with the reasonable expectation that this information would be kept confidential and not used for any purpose other than to assist the investigation and judicial process.

The release of the information, even if it were redacted to protect the identity of individuals involved, may potentially lead to those who have given the information to lose faith in the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) if they were to discover the information they gave has been released and therefore they would be less inclined to assist the MPS in future investigations if needed.

In addition, the wider public may also be deterred from reporting crime and assisting the MPS with investigations as they too may fear that the information they give would potentially be released into the public domain at a later time. Over time, the perception that police investigative material and investigations are not confidential that would result from the release of information of this nature, would be likely to adversely affect the ability of the police to obtain information in connection with future investigations

The MPS is committed to transparency with the public and recognises that greater transparency is likely to improve public confidence in the MPS. However, this must be balanced against the potential that release of this information would undermine our core policing functions.

The requested information is of a sensitive/personal nature. The public release of this information would harm any future investigation and potentially lead the wider public to lose faith in the confidentiality expected when assisting the MPS with investigations. This is important as the sole reason that the MPS holds this information is for the purpose of a criminal investigation.

On balance, I believe that the public interest supports refusing this aspect of your request.

Section 40(2)&(3)(a)(i) - Personal Information - provides that any information to which a request for information relates, is exempt information if the first condition of Section 40(3A)(a) is satisfied. The first condition of Section 40(3A)(a) states that personal information is exempt if its disclosure would contravene any of the data protection principles. If the disclosure of the requested personal data would not contravene the data protection principles, the disclosure must also not contravene Sections 3A(b) and 3B of the Act.

There are six principles that are set out in Article 5(1)(a) of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) that dictate when the processing of personal data is lawful. The first principle requires that any processing of personal data must be lawful, fair and transparent. Under Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR, the disclosure of personal data is considered to be lawful if:

a. There is a legitimate interest in the disclosure of that personal data.
b. The disclosure of the personal data is necessary to meet that legitimate interest.
c. The disclosure would not cause unwarranted harm to the data subject.

Having considered your request and given regard to the legitimate interest test, I have found that:

a. The disclosure of the case logs, redacted or non-redacted, contains information whereby the victim(s), witness(s) and suspect(s) would be able to be identified. The disclosure of this personal data would satisfy a legitimate interest, being to provide factual information about the recorded offences.

b. The disclosure of this information is necessary to meet the legitimate interest identified at point above.

c. The public release of the personal data held would disclose information about identifiable people. The release of this information by the police would be unexpected and potentially distressing to this person. In this regard, I believe that the disclosure of this personal data would be likely to cause unwarranted harm to the data subjects of this request.

Personal Criminal Offence Data - The requested case logs contain operational updates about criminal investigations from which living persons can be identified. Having considered the legitimate interest test in respect of this personal data, I have found that:

a. The Information Commissioner’s guidance on the release of personal criminal offence data under the Act states:

‘Due to its sensitivity, the conditions for processing criminal offence data are very restrictive and generally concern specific, stated purposes. Consequently, only two are relevant to allow you to lawfully disclose under FOIA or the EIR. They are similar to those identified above for special category data. These are:

• consent from the data subject; or
• the processing relates to personal data which has clearly been made public by the individual concerned.

If a relevant condition cannot be met, you must not disclose the information as disclosure would be unlawful and therefore in contravention of principle (a).’

The conditions required to release personal criminal offence data are not present in this case. The release of the requested personal data does not accordingly satisfy a legitimate interest and cannot be disclosed under the Act.

The provision to refuse access to information under Section 40(2)(a)(b) and (3A)(a) of the Act is both absolute and class based. When this exemption is claimed, it is accepted that harm would result from disclosure. There is accordingly no requirement to demonstrate what that harm may be in refusing access to information.

Disclosure

Please find attached data on the number of assault offences by members of the public against staff in these two establishments.