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 civil claims were brought against your force between 2017 - 2019?
2. How many of those claims were for a, false imprisonment / unlawful arrest . b. battery c.. assault?
3. How many of the claims were settled outside of court? How many of these were false imprisonment claims?
4. How many claims did you deny liability for? How many of these were relating to false imprisonment?
5. How many of those claims proceeded to court? How many of these were relating to false imprisonment?
6. How many of those claims did you "win"? How many of these were relating to false imprisonment?
7. How many of these claims did you "lose"? How many of these were relating to false imprisonment?
8. What was the overall value of these claims? b.How much did you pay out? c.How many of these were relating to false imprisonment?
9. What checks and balances does your force have in place to make sure that officers are exercising their powers lawfully? For example, how do you make sure that when arresting someone the arresting officer has both necessity and reasonable suspicion?
You defied the below as relating to the formal complaints process:
10. What is the investigation process of your Professional Standards Department?
11. How many complaints did you receive regarding false imprisonment / unlawful arrest?
12. How many did you investigate?
13. How many of these complaints did you uphold.
14. lease also provide me with any statistics for complaints that went thorough or were referred to the IOPC or any other body.
I want all of the general statistics on all civil claims brought against you, and then a breakdown of how many of those claims/complaints (depending on what I asked for) pertain to false imprisonment. Evidently, the only statistics I want for battery and assault are in relation to point two because that is what I asked for.”
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with both our Legal and Professional Standards Departments 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.
The information requested is not held centrally nor is it held in a format that allows its extraction within the permitted 18 hour threshold. This is particularly relevant at point 14, which would entail a manual review of over 100 complaints to locate, extract and compile information requested at that point, and therefore push this request well over the permitted 18 hour threshold. As we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 18 hours, 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 the remaining questions
If this would be useful, you may wish to remove point 14 and resubmit your request to allow us to provide a response to the remainder.
