FOI 760-2025 / Jul 2025 / Stop search data
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 760-2025
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 24th July 2025 as follows:
The information being sought relates to the datasets gathered by various public safety bodies in your area.
We are requesting the following data for the year 2024:
Q1. How many stop and search encounters took place in Warwickshire?
Q2. How many police officers were present at every encounter?
Q3. 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 response for Warwickshire Police set out below.
Response: Please be advised that the information requested at Q2 is not centrally recorded and is therefore not held in a readily retrievable format. Whilst information relating to stop and search encounters in 2024 was prepared for the Annual Data Return to the Home Office, this did not require the number of officers present at each encounter to be included. Therefore, in order to determine a response to Q2, it would be necessary to conduct a manual search of each stop and search encounter on an individual basis. I can advise that in 2024, 1,367 stop and search encounters took place in Warwickshire. The business area has estimated that it would take approximately 5 minutes per encounter to review, extract and record this information, which would equate to 114 hours of work. Therefore, this exceeds 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; however, due to the volume of records that would need to be individually reviewed, I am unable to suggest a way to reduce this part of the request into one that could be managed within the fees limit.
Regarding Q3, I can advise that it may be possible to locate and retrieve the following information within the fees limit: ‘Type of search’, ‘Legislation’, ‘Object of search’, ‘Outcomes’, as well as ‘Gender’ and ‘Ethnicity’ of person searched, should you wish to revise and resubmit your request
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