Ebay & Facebook

1. For each of the 2009 and 2010 calendar years how many crimes have been reported to your force where ‘eBay’ has been the venue of the crime? Please could you also provide me with a list of the number of each type of crime reported as having been committed on eBay.

2. For each of the 2009 and 2010 calendar years how many crimes have been reported to your force where Facebook has been a key element of the crime reported. Please provide a breakdown of those offences.

If providing data for 2009 as well as 2010 would breach the cost limit please reduce the scope of this question to just 2010.

In accordance with section 1(1) (a) of the Act our response is provided below;

From our assessment we estimate that compliance with your request would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12 of the Freedom of information Act 2000. This is currently £450 The reasons for this are that e Bay and Facebook are not 'an occurrence locations'. They may feature in some way in reported incidents but they cannot be the crime/incident locations, but perhaps a conduit or means to aid an offender, (your previous requests regarding social networking sites used for grooming would give you an indication of that) Our systems contain 77430 references to e bay and 2396 references to Facebook. To get anywhere the information we think you are seeking would require a manual search of records, which although we can filter some extent would it is estimated take a couple of weeks to achieve a result. this will exceed the appropriate limit.

Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires the Cheshire Constabulary, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you with a notice which a) states that fact, b) specifies the exemption in question and c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.

The appropriate limit is defined in the Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004, which is covered by statutory Instrument Number 3244 of 2004. Furthermore, Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 allows a public authority to refuse to respond to a request for information where the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit as defined by the above mentioned regulations.

I am unable at this stage to offer a reasonable alternative to achieve the results that you are seeking. To narrow the request down to specific offences would seem to be more realistic but even so its still likely to be a heavy piece of work and may not be achievable.

Police forces in the United Kingdom are routinely required to provide crime 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 crime data. It should be noted that for these reasons this force's response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other response you may receive.