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 2018 – How many times was "Solo deployment" or "single crewing" implemented
- FOR 2017 – How many times was "Solo deployment" or "single crewing" implemented
- FOR 2016 – How many times was "Solo deployment" or "single crewing" implemented
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
We do not hold statistical data regarding how many times an officer was singled crewed at any point in his tour of duty. Whilst it may mention the fact somewhere, ie on an incident log or pocket note book, extraction of any data held would require a manual review of incident logs, note books etc of every officer in the force for each day they were on duty. This would not be retrievable within the 18 hour time limit. As we have estimated that to extract this information would take well 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.
When applying Section 12 exemption our duty to assist under Section 16 of the Act would normally entail that we contact you to determine whether it is possible to refine the scope of your request to bring it within the cost limits. However, from the information we have outlined above I see no reasonable way in which we can do so.
