FOI 958-2024 / Oct 2024 / Stop and search
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 958-2024
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 31st October 2024 as follows:
I submit this request for specific information regarding the stop and search data in Warwickshire Police area of responsibility. The information being sought relates to the datasets gathered by various public safety bodies in your area. This information is sought under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA 2000). We are requesting the following data for the year 2023:
- How many stop and search encounters took place in the area?
- How many police officers were present at every encounter?
- In addition to data for question 2, please provide data sorted by grounds, object and purpose of the search, legal power used, police outcome, action taken/sanction (if applicable), offence (if applicable), as well as the gender, age and ethnicity of the person stop and searched.
Please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in providing the response to your request and for any inconvenience that this may have caused. Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Response: Please be advised that the information requested at Q2 is not held in a readily retrievable format. In order to determine the number of officers present at a stop search it would be necessary to review the circumstances of each and every record on Stop Search database, along with the corresponding incident log, on an individual basis. During 2023 there was a total of 1311 Stop Searches conducted and, at a very conservative estimate of 3 minutes per record, this would equate to in excess of 65 hours. Therefore, searches would exceed the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e., the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. For Police forces in the UK, the ‘appropriate limit’ is up to 18 hours of work on one request.
In accordance with Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and, if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit, then section 12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance; however, due to the volume of records that would need to be individually reviewed, I am unable to suggest a way to reduce this element of your request into one which could be managed within the fees limit. However, were you to resubmit your request, removing Q2, then we may be able to conduct searches for Q1 and Q3 within the fees limit.
Your attention is drawn to the below which details your right of complaint.
Should you have any further enquiries concerning this matter, please write or email the Freedom of Information Unit quoting the reference number above.
Yours sincerely
Freedom of Information Officer
Freedom of Information Unit
Warwickshire Police
PO Box 4
Leek Wootton
Warwickshire
CV35 7QB