Shoplifting reports (FOI)

​Request

How many incidents of shoplifting have been reported in Jersey over the past five years? Could you break this down by year, location, items stolen, or cost of amounts stolen and the outcome?

Response

The States of Jersey Police do hold the information requested however the request is refused.

With 1,079 reports of theft from shops in the past five years, to research the information requested would take in excess of the time allowed under the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014. If the information requested could be extracted from information held on each case in five minutes, the total time to extract all the information requested would take in excess of 90 hours.

A breakdown of the recorded crimes of theft from shops by year can be provided as follows:

(A shop reporting two thefts in the previous week would be counted as one crime under Home Office counting rules)

Article 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.