Incidents of Needle Spiking, 13 January – 03 February 2025
Date of request: 6 February 2025
Reference: 191/25
Request
I am writing to request information you may hold regarding the number of incidents of needle spiking between 13th January 2025 and 3rd February 2025.
I am particularly interested in those incidents which occurred in the BS8 postcode area, but any data you could provide would be helpful. After reading a previous request regarding the number of spiking incidents, I am aware this information normally comes under Administering poison with intent to injure or annoy.
Response
Avon and Somerset Police holds information on the subject you have requested. However, we will not be able to answer your request without exceeding the appropriate limit. This is because the information is not centrally recorded and would involve an extensive search of our files to find and collate.
There is no specific category of crime, or data entry field within our crime recording system, for offences involving needle spiking. As referred to in your request, such offences may be recorded under the following offence types (which may also include incidents not involving needle spiking):
- Administering poison with intent to injure or annoy (Home Office offence code 008/02)
- Administering a substance with intent: Sexual Offences Act (088/05)
However, incidents of spiking may also be recorded under a number of other categories of offence within broader offence groups of Sexual Offences or Violence Against The Person, if the spiking was carried out to facilitate a further, more serious offence. All crimes recorded in the specified timeframe in any potentially relevant category of offence would need to be manually reviewed, to confirm the number that involved needle spiking. With 490 crimes recorded under Sexual Offences and 3,859 under Violence Against The Person, we estimate that this would take far more than 18 hours to complete.
Section 12 of the Act makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate cost limit, which for police authorities is set at £450 or 18 staff hours. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2.5 working days in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting it.
This serves as a refusal notice under section 17(1) of the FOI Act.
Unfortunately, I am unable to suggest a way in which you could refine your request that would enable us to provide an accurate response specifically relating to incidents of needle spiking. If you would like to amend your request, we would be able to confirm the number of crimes recorded under specified offence types, such as those listed above, within the requested timeframe.