FAQ Details
Complaints - 487/11
Dated: 07 Jun 2011
Date of request: 03/07/2011
Date of response: 08/07/2011
Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')
Thank you for your email dated 3rd July 2011 in which you made a request for access to certain information which may be held by Northumbria Police.
As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.
You asked:
Please supply number of police officers who are currently serving in Northumbria Police.
Please supply full details of the number of those officers who have one or more complaints made against them.
Please supply full details of how many of those officers have proven complaints against them.
- Please supply full details on what is the percentage of complaints against officers that are then proved.
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 Professional Standards Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police, however will not be disclosed for the following reason.
To provide information which meets the criteria of your request would entail a member of staff manually searching each officers records to ascertain whether or not they have had any complaints made against them. Currently we have over 4000 officers, some of which have many years of service. 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 133 hours, therefore Section 12 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 that part of your request.
However, in order to provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I can advise that if you refined your request with a search period for cases recorded, e.g. for the year 2009 or other, this may bring your request under the prescribed time limit.
You may also be interested to know that similar queries have been released in the past and are published on the Northumbria Police Disclosure Log. For your convenience I have supplied the relevant link belowhttp://www.northumbria.police.uk/foi/disclosurelog/index.asp
In addition to the above, although excess cost removes Northumbria Police's obligations under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, as a gesture of goodwill, I have supplied information below, relative to your request, retrieved or available before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of your request.
1. Information regarding police officer numbers is freely available on the Northumbria Police website.
http://www.northumbria.police.uk/about_us/
4. Details regarding percentages at this part of your request is not held, therefore will not be supplied, however this is something that you can calculate yourself with the responses to questions 2 and 3 should you wish to define and resubmit your request.
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.
How to complain
If you are unhappy with our decision or do not consider that we have handled your request properly and we are unable to resolve this issue informally, you are entitled to make a formal complaint to us under our complaints procedure which can be found at: http://www.northumbria.police.uk/foi/disclosurelog/foicomprights.asp
If you are still unhappy after we have investigated your complaint and reported to you the outcome, you may complain directly to the Information Commissioner’s Office and request that they investigate to ascertain whether we have dealt with your request in accordance with the Act.
Yours sincerely
Michael Cleugh
Data Protection and Disclosure Advisor
Direct Dial: 01661 868347