Care home abuse (FOI ref: 1611A/24)
Request
I would like to make the following freedom of information request to West Midlands Police.
Please can you give the following information for the following years 2021, 2022, 2023 and if possible so far 2024.
***I'd like the information for elderly care homes i.e. those over 65. If you cannot break that down please provide the information for all adult care homes and make that clear***
- How many reports of concerns about abuse/safeguarding have been
reported to your force within in adult care home setting? (care homes, nursing homes etc) *In terms of abuse – physical, financial, sexual, neglect. Please break down by the years above and if possible by the type of allegation.
- How many of those reports have resulted in an investigation into
the allegations? Please break down by the years above and if possible by the type of allegation.
- How many of those investigations have resulted in charges being
brought by the force? Please break down by the years above and if possible by the type of allegation.
Response
Please find attached our response.
Please note: we have searched for all offences where the location description was care/nursing home, with victim age of 65 and over.
In relation to question 2, all reported crimes are subject to a Foundation Investigation, so the figures will be the same as question 1. For question 3, the outcome descriptions have been provided.
In order to locate and retrieve this information we have searched where the location description has been entered. There may be other records where the incident occurred in a Care/Nursing Home, but there is no entry in the field.
As the request has specified for the ages to be 65 and over, this has been selected in victim age. There may be other records where the incident occurred with a victim of 65+, but there is no way of being sure if the victim age field was not completed.
Please note that this data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of incidents/crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of incidents/crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently, statistics on incidents/crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future incidents in that area.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that this data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request may be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of data which has relevance to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.