Tool theft (FOI ref: 1658A/24)

Request

Please may you provide me with the latest information held on crime relating to tool theft in the West Midlands area between October 2023 and October 2024:

a. Total number of instances of tool theft reported across the year.

b. Additional breakdown of where the tool theft took place (for example, number of thefts from vehicles, number from home, number from a workplace, number from a construction site).

Response

See as follows.

a. Total number of instances of tool theft reported, by month.

b. Breakdown of where the tool theft took place (for example, number of thefts from vehicles, number from home, number from a workplace, number from a construction site), by month.

See following table but please note*: The ‘Location Description’ field in our crime system is not a mandatory recording field, resulting in it being blank in approximately 90% of the 837 reported tool theft offences. For cases such as this in the table below, we have used the ‘Offence Description’ as an alternative method to describe the theft location. For instance, if the offence was a residential burglary of an unconnected building, this offence description is provided as an alternative. Additionally, in cases where a location description was recorded but the offence description offered better context (such as a theft from a motor vehicle offence with a location description of ‘Car park’) we have chosen to instead provide the offence description*:

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.