Lego theft (FOI ref: 356A/25)
Original request
I am writing under the FOI Act to request records of high-value (over £500 in value) retail thefts involving Lego products since January 2019.
More specifically:
- The number of recorded shoplifting and burglary offences where "Lego" is explicitly mentioned in police reports, broken down by year and location.
- Which of these cases led to a charge or conviction.
- Any recorded cases where multiple thefts of Lego were linked to the same suspect or group, and whether these were classified as part of an organised crime operation.
- A breakdown of locations where Lego thefts were reported, specifying whether they occurred in:
- Major retailers (e.g., supermarkets, toy chains)
- Independent toy stores
- Residential burglaries
- Warehouses or storage facilities
- A monthly breakdown of Lego-related thefts to assess seasonal trends in theft occurrences.
- The total estimated value of stolen Lego items in recorded incidents, where available.
Amended request
I would like to move forward with the adaptation you proposed for my FOI request, but with a few fine tunings - if that's alright:
- I'm not interested in burglary of residential properties. I want to get information solely about businesses.
- Q1 is not a long enough time frame for me. I'd be grateful if you could consider looking for information from the past 2 years (from 2023 Q1 until today).
- As for the burglary's location - would it be possible to get information about where the burglary occurred (address and/or business name)?
Response
Please find attached our response. Please note, data for the location has been provided by category, to provide information in relation to individual locations would likely to be exempt under S31 of the FOI Act.
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.