Crimes involving zombie knives and machetes

Response

Your request has been considered and I regret to advise you that your request is refused under Section 12 of the Act because we estimate that the cost of retrieving the requested information would exceed the cost limits under the Act.

Section 12 makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit, which for police authorities is set at £450 or 18 staff hours work. 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 letter represents a Refusal Notice under the Act.

This is because the information requested is not centrally recorded and would involve an extensive search of individual records to find and collate it. There is no specific weapon category for ‘Zombie Knife’ or machete, therefore every crime involving a weapon categorised as ‘Knife/Dagger/Broken Bottle’ and ‘Machete/Hatchet’ to identify those relevant to your request. with over 8,000 crimes recorded with one of these types of weapons, it is estimated it would take considerably longer than 18 hours to comply with your request.

If you would like to refine your request to bring it down to a more manageable level, we may be able to supply you with some of the information you require. This can be done by requesting crimes with a weapon type of:

‘Knife/Dagger/Broken Bottle’

‘Machete/Hatchet’

Please let me know if you would like to request this information.