Crimes facilitated by social media and eBay (FOI)

Request

How many crimes involving Facebook, Twitter, eBay have been recorded over the past two years?

Could you break this down into which website and the nature of the crime.

Response

The States of Jersey Police crime recording system uses the ‘type’ of crime committed as the core of its database. The fact that an individual used some form of social media to facilitate the crime is ancillary and cannot be searched separately.

To answer this request would require a manual search of each and every crime recorded over a period of two years.

Crimes that could be facilitated using social media include harassment, fraud, grooming, possession / distribution of indecent images, hate crimes, and incitement to commit any other crime.

To manually search each and every crime would take in excess of the time permitted under the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011, to locate, retrieve and extract the information.

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.