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. The number of officers currently employed by your force who have declared criminal convictions
2. Details of the criminal conviction in each case, with brief explanatory note where necessary
3. The rank of the officer in each case
4. The date of the conviction in each case
AND (if different i.e. criminal convictions not declared but since discovered by your force/ obtained during employment)
5. The total number of officers currently employed by your force who have criminal convictions (if different to the answer from question 1)
6. Details of the criminal conviction in each case, with brief explanatory note where necessary (if different to the answer from question 2)
7. The rank of the officer in each case (if different to the answer from question 3)
8. The date of the conviction in each case (if different to the answer from question 4)
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Professional Standards Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police.
However, the information requested is not held centrally nor in an easily retrievable format.
With regards to point 1 this information could only be retrieved by either checking the personal file of each officer as held by People Services, or searching for each officer on the Police National Computer (PNC) to establish if they had receive any criminal convictions. To carry out either process and provide a response to these parts of the request has been estimated as well exceeding the permitted time threshold. Within excess of 3300 police officers, even at a conservative estimate of 10 minutes per individual file, to respond to this part alone would take in excess of 550 hours. As we have estimated that to extract this information would take over the permitted 18 hours, Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act does apply. This section does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimated that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours, equating to £450.00.
You should consider this to be a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Act for that part of your request.
As part of your request would exceed the prescribed limit, as defined by the Act, there is no requirement for Northumbria Police to provide a response to the remaining parts of your request. However, in order to provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, an initial assessment of the information that may be provided within the time constraints would be as follows:
For each of the calendar years 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 please provide:
How many police officers employed by your force were convicted of a criminal offence whilst employed by Northumbria Police?
For each police officer convicted of a criminal offence, provide their rank and offence they were convicted of?
For each police officer convicted of a criminal offence, the court penalty they were given (e.g. imprisonment, suspended imprisonment, fine, etc)?
For each police officer convicted of a criminal offence, the formal action taken by your force against the officer (e.g. dismissed without notice, written warning, no action, etc) or whether they resigned or retired?
If that would be useful you may wish to define and resubmit your request accordingly
