FOI 866-2025 / Aug 2025 / Shooting reports
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 866-2025
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 18th August 2025 as follows:
Q1. Please provide data showing how many report of shootings your force has received between 2020-2025. Please break data down per year. For the year 2025, please provide data as close to the present date as possible.
Please search for the terms "gunshot", "gun shot", "shooting", "firearm", "bullet", "shot".
A shooting is defined as the act of discharging a firearm.
Q2. Please also provide data showing how many firearms you have recovered and confiscated between 2020-2025. Please break data down per year. For the year 2025, please provide data as close to the present date as possible.
Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Response: Please be advised that some of the requested information is not centrally recorded and is therefore not held in a readily retrievable format. Regarding Q2, the Property Management System does not have a field to record whether a firearm was seized, recovered, found, or surrendered. The business area has advised that for the period specified, there are 5,848 entries relating to firearms on the Property Management System. In order to determine the number that relate to recovered or confiscated, it would be necessary to manually review each entry on an individual basis for details of the specific circumstances. In some cases, this will involve cross-referencing to the Command-and-Control or Crime Recording Systems. At a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record to review, this would equate to 488 hours of work for this element alone. Therefore, this 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(1) 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 on refining your request. I can advise that should you wish to remove this part of the request, it may be possible to conduct the keyword searches at Q1 within the fees limit. However, to review each result for relevance, i.e to identify those that relate to reports of shootings, would be entirely dependent on the number of records that would need to be reviewed on an individual basis and how long it would take to review each one. Therefore, should you wish to resubmit Q1, please be mindful that there is a possibility that this may still exceed the fees limit. Further, in the event that information is retrievable within the cost threshold, this would be subject to the usual disclosure considerations.
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information provided is as accurate as possible.
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