Dog theft (FOI ref: 480/26)

Request

I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 regarding dog theft within your force area. Please provide the following information:

1. Annual Totals: The total number of recorded crimes involving the theft or abduction of a dog for each of the last 5 calendar years (up to and including 2025)

2. Specific Offence Codes: If possible, please break these down by the Home Office offence code (e.g., how many were recorded under the new Pet Abduction Act 2024 vs. general theft/burglary)

3. Location Type: For each recorded crime, please provide the "location type" (e.g., dwelling/home, garden, public park, outside a shop, or from a vehicle)

4. Outcomes: The number of these cases that resulted in a charge or summons, a community resolution, or where no suspect was identified

5. Breeds: If held and within the cost limit, the top three dog breeds most frequently reported as stolen in the last year

Response

1. Annual Totals: The total number of recorded crimes involving the theft or abduction of a dog for each of the last 5 calendar years (up to and including 2025)

Table 1.

2. Specific Offence Codes: If possible, please break these down by the Home Office offence code (e.g., how many were recorded under the new Pet Abduction Act 2024 vs. general theft/burglary)

Table 2.

3. Location Type: For each recorded crime, please provide the "location type" (e.g., dwelling/home, garden, public park, outside a shop, or from a vehicle)

Table 3.

4. Outcomes: The number of these cases that resulted in a charge or summons, a community resolution, or where no suspect was identified

Table 4.

5. Breeds: If held and within the cost limit, the top three dog breeds most frequently reported as stolen in the last year

Note – As shown in the following table, breed is not a mandatory recording field on our crime system and therefore it is not possible to provide this information:

Table 5.

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.