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:
How many phone calls and online contacts did your police force receive about anti-social behaviour from 1st October 2020 to 30th September 2021? Please provide separate figures for phone calls and online contacts.
Of these (giving answers for phone and online contacts):
a) How many led to no action (no action means none of the actions in points b to e in the list below were taken)?
b) How many were resolved at the time of contact by a call handler, or online at the time of contact by a member of staff on Live Chat?
c) How many led to an officer being dispatched?
d) How many led to an officer or other staff member making contact with the complainant after the call or contact, but not visiting in person?
e) How many were referred to another agency such as a local authority or housing association (either by the police making the referral, or advising the complainant to make contact with the other agency themselves)?
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
To provide information which meets the criteria of your request, particularly at questions a, b and e, would entail a member of staff manually searching over 63,811 records. Even at a conservative estimate of 2 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 2,127 hours, therefore Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act would 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 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 questions c and d, and we may also be able to provide how many were reported via phone, online, or via any other means of incident reporting.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
