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Abuse of Position - 189/20

Date Responded 19 February 2020

Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')

As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held at the time of a request, by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.

You asked:

  1. How many of your force’s officers have been referred to the IPCC/IOPC for abuse of position for sexual purpose, and abuse of position for the purpose of pursuing an improper relationship (I believed it is categorised under the general heading of serious corruption) in a) 2018 and b) 2019
  2. Of these, for each year how many were subject to misconduct proceedings and how many to gross misconduct? Ie 2018, 42 misconduct and 23 gross misconduct.
  3. What were the outcomes of the proceedings in each year ie in 2018, 12 no misconduct found, 3 written warning 2 dismissed, 1 retired etc
  4. Of the officers who were dismissed, please provide details of their cases including name, rank and summary of allegations proved. There can be no reason not to do so given that these cases will have been open to the public and the officers’ names will be on the barred register. Obviously I do not expect you to provide the names of their victims.

In Response:

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Profession Standards Department of Northumbria Police.  I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police.

Of cases finalised I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.

1 - 3.  2018 -  1 officer -  Gross Misconduct – Dismissed

4.  As the information you have requested is accessible by other means I have not provided you with a copy of the information and will rely on Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.  You should therefore consider this a refusal for your request.

I have provided an explanation to this exemption below.

Section 21 (1) - Information accessible by other means

Information which is reasonably accessible to the applicant is exempt information.

These details have been published and are therefore in the public domain.  Simple searches for Jon Snaith will being back relevant press releases.

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.

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