Cyberbullying reports (FOI)

Request

I would like to know the number of reported cases of cyberbullying to the States of Jersey Police between 2012 and 2017.

By the term cyberbullying I mean a variety of crimes committed by offenders online, including:

• threats of violence

• sending any form of sexually explicit messages or photos

• taking a photo or video of someone in a place where he or she would expect privacy

• stalking and hate crimes

I would like these figures broken down by year / number of incidents in a table.

Response

The States of Jersey Police do not record ‘Cyberbullying’ as a crime category. Crimes are recorded by their individual titles. If there is an element of computer usage in the crime, it is flagged as a ‘Cyber-crime’.

For the period requested, 2012 to 2017, the States police have 624 crimes flagged as a Cyber-crime. Of these 236 relate to crimes involving some form of fraud or scam where money was the objective of the crime.

There are 110 crimes of causing harassment, alarm or distress with some cyber element.

There are 89 crimes of either possessing or making / distributing indecent images of children via electronic means. Some of these were separate incidents for the same offender. The table below shows the 60 offenders.

There are also six cases of attempted blackmail where the victim has been threatened with release of pictures of themselves having shared images with a person previously unknown to them.

It is not possible within the time allowed to research each event to give details of each individual crime to establish if threats of violence were included in in any of the offences.

It would take in excess of ten minutes to read each crime allowing only a total of up to 72 of the 388 non fraud crimes to be researched in the 12.5 hour limit.

To research all 388 crimes would exceed the cost limit provisions allowed under Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 and the 12.5 hours maximum allowed under regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014.

Exemption applied

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive.

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.