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:
Please provide the following information about your force’s use of mobile biometric technology for the periods between April 2020 and the end of December 2021; if you do not hold this information for the whole length of the period stated above, please provide it for the period starting from the date you began recording the information:
- The number of times the mobile biometrics devices were used.
- The following information about each search: which database was searched (Police [IDENT1] or Immigration [IABS]) or both), date, reason for fingerprinting, officer defined ethnicity, self defined ethnicity, gender of the person scanned, age of person scanned, PNC search location, response (i.e. whether the search returned a record. If so, please specify which database the record was returned from).
- How many times was Command & Control contacted following a search.
- The location of where the initial Stop and Scan was done (e.g. street, neighborhood, city, patch), however your force records this.
- If your force does not currently use mobile biometric scanners, please state if there are plans to adopt the use of the devices, and if yes on what date.
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Forensics, Force Coordination and Operations Departments of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is not held by Northumbria Police.
Please note that this information may be held by The Met Police.
You may also find of interest our response to a similar request which is published on our disclosure log - FOI 112/22 refers and a link is provided below to the disclosure log.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.
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.
