How many reports of crime(s) (e.g. antisocial behaviour) on all London buses have been made from 2019-January 2022 (to date)?
Request ID: FOI-2680-2122 Date published: 04 March 2022
You asked
Please provide me with information about how many crimes (e.g. antisocial behaviour, assault, theft) were reported on all London bus routes from January 2019-January 2022 (to date). Please can you break this down by year.
We answered
Our ref: FOI-2680-2122/GH
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 31 January 2022 asking for information about reports of crimes on London Buses. Our transport network is a safe, low crime network where millions of passengers travel every day with very few ever experiencing or witnessing crime.
Everyone has the right to work or travel without fear and if anyone witnesses or is victim to crime they should report it immediately.
We work closely with our police partners, funding more than 2,500 officers across the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), British Transport Police (BTP) and the City of London Police (CoLP). They police London's transport network to tackle crime and antisocial behaviour, and make customers feel safer when travelling in London. In addition to this, there is an extensive CCTV network, and thousands of frontline transport staff and enforcement officers there to keep customers safe
We regularly publish information regarding crime and incidents on our network on our website:
Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy. I can confirm that we do hold some of the information you require. Please see the attached spreadsheet, which shows the requested information, broken down by year.
Please note that bus crime information is provided to TfL by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). Information requested directly from the MPS may differ to the figures provided, as TfL does not have access to live data, and reports may have since been updated.
It is not a requirement for the MPS to record the bus route number. Additionally, the victim may not recall the route number they were on. To provide the best estimate of bus-related crime, TfL and the Met Police use a bespoke query which searches for a range of keywords identifiable with the bus network to generate a set of bus-related crime records. We are unable to provide data on the route number / bus number as the MPS crime data we receive does not allow us to readily report on this. The bus route number may be recorded in free-text details describing the events of each crime, however this is not always noted by the recording officer (or, as mentioned above, is known by victims of crime). We would need to manually read each crime report to see if this information was included, and this would take an excessive amount of time. Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with requests if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Details on where the crime was reported and who it was reported to is not held by TfL. You may wish to ask the MPS if they can provide you with this information.
If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Graham Hurt FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
