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:
For the year ending March 2019 please could you provide:
1. Total number of adults held in detention
2. Total number of adults charged and bailed to court
3. Total number of adults charged and detained for court
For the three figures above please provide a breakdown by a) ethnicity, b) gender and c) whether the offence had a domestic abuse flag or not.
On the 19th June you the added the below to the request:
I write to clarify one thing in my request below - please provide self-defined ethnicity breakdown rather than officer-defined/ethnicity appearance
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
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 in part by Northumbria Police however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
The information requested at points 2 & 3 is not held in a format that allows its extraction within the permitted 18 hour threshold. This information can only be established by reviewing the history of each individual crime. As a crime is investigated the status of the crime will change and the history is not recorded except in the narrative of each crime, hence a manual review of each is required. For the time period requested there have been in excess of 27,500 detentions. Even at a conservative estimate of 3 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 1400 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 question 1 only, broken as asked at points a), b) and c).
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
