Sexual Grooming HO code 88A incidents in financial year 2021/2
Date of request: 7 November 2022
Reference: 1247-22
Request
- In the last financial year 2021/22 please state how many (a) crimes were logged and (b) people charged by your force with sexual grooming (Home Office Offence code: 88A)?
- In relation to the reports of the crimes having been committed (rather than the cases of people being charged) is there a facility on your computer databases to flag if a particular website or social media platform was used as the basis for the communication?
- If you did record the sites/platforms could you provide me with the breakdown of how many crime cases that were logged related to each website/platform, making sure to identify the website/platform.
Response
1a)From 2021 to 2022 there have been 245 recorded crimes under Home Office offence Code 88A
1b)Please see table below for outcomes of those 245 recorded crimes
| Current Classification HO Outcome Code and Desc | Count of Crimes |
| Filed – Incident Report OR CRI | 1 |
| New – Under Investigation | 53 |
| OC01 – Charge/Summons | 23 |
| OC03 – Caution – Adults | 2 |
| OC08 – Community Resolution | 1 |
| OC10 – Not in Public Interest (Pol) | 2 |
| OC14 – No Sus / Victim Decline | 21 |
| OC15 – Sus/Insuff.Evidence | 36 |
| OC16 – Sus/Victim Declines | 13 |
| OC17 – Time Limit Expired | 1 |
| OC18 – No Sus / No Line Enq / Filed | 84 |
| OC20 – Transferred Oth Agency | 2 |
| OC21 – Investig. not in Public Int. (Police) | 4 |
| OC22 – Diversionary, educational, intervention | 1 |
| 1 | |
| Sum: | 245 |
2. There is no facility within our Records Management System (Niche) to flag a specific website or platform.
3. As we do not have a specific field to record this (see question 2), the process of identifying the information sought would require a manual interrogation of each of the 245 incidents. It is estimated that this would take in excess of 18 hours to complete and would attract a refusal of the request under Section 12 of the Act. However, given the conditional nature of this question, we have provided answers to your other questions above as requested rather than apply Section 12 to the request as a whole.