Arrests For Possession of Ketamine

Request Number: FOI/14835

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Alcohol and Drugs

Subject: Arrests For Possession of Ketamine

Request and Answer:
Your request for information below has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) We can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does hold the information you have requested however it is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and this will be further explained below. PSNI have followed the Information Commissioner’s Office guidance ‘Requests where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit’ in relation to this request, which also provides further detail on the application of Section 12 (1) of the FOIA. This guidance is available on the ICO website at the following link:
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf

Request 1
Statistics showing the number of people who have been arrested for possession of ketamine (class B) under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 in each of the last 5 calendar years.

Specific offences:
Possession of a Controlled Drug – Class B (Ketamine)
Possession of a Controlled Drug with Intent to Supply – Class B (Ketamine)
Supply or Offer to Supply a Controlled Drug – Class B (Ketamine)
Production or Cultivation of a Controlled Drug – Class B (Ketamine)

Request 2
And for each of those categories, are you able to break down the numbers to separate offenders over 18s and under 18s.

Answer
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires the Police Service of Northern Ireland, when refusing to provide such information (because the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit) to provide you the applicant with a notice which states that fact.

It is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Section 12 of FOIA allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to either comply with the request in its entirety or confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. The estimate must be reasonable in the circumstances of the case. The ‘appropriate limit’ is currently £600 for central government and £450 for all other public authorities including PSNI. The relevant Regulations which define the appropriate limit for section 12 purposes are The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244. These are known as the ‘Fees Regulations’ for brevity.

Regulation 4(3) of the Fees Regulations states that a public authority can take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in carrying out the following permitted activities in complying with the request:

(i) determining whether the information is held;
(ii) locating the information, or a document containing it;
(iii) retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and
(iv) extracting the information from a document containing it.

Under those regulations PSNI can calculate the time spent on each of these permitted activities at £25 per hour (thus if the activity(s) takes more than 18 hours PSNI will be in excess of the ‘appropriate limit’).

When a public authority is estimating whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if the conditions laid out in Regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations can be satisfied. Those conditions require the requests to be:

• made by one person, or by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign;
• made for the same or similar information; and
• received by the public authority within any period of 60 consecutive working days.

Regulation 5(2) of the Fees Regulations requires that the requests which are to be aggregated relate “to any extent” to the same or similar information. This is quite a wide test but public authorities should still ensure that the requests meet this requirement.

Enquiries made in relation to your request has identified that retrieval of information to respond to your request would exceed the FOI legislative cost of 18 hours as set by the Secretary of State.

PSNI hold statistics as ‘victim based’ and not by ‘suspects’. Whilst ‘suspect’ data is held on the database NICHE it would require manual intervention.

In addition there are no specific offence codes that allow for the identification of ‘ketamine’ possession, supplying/ offering to supply or possession with intent to supply (distribution). These offences are recorded under the more generic offences of ‘Class B’ drugs and therefore the information whilst it is held electronically it is not held in the format that would allow their retrieval without a manual trawl. To identify if an offence included in the police recorded crime statistics referenced ‘ketamine’, the closest relevant offences, the possession or supply of a Class B controlled drug, would need to be examined and a manual review undertaken. PSNI can advise that are 8,970 arrests for the time period requested. At 10 minutes per record, this would take approximately 1495 hours to retrieve this information, grossly exceeding the legislative timeframe of 18 hours.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter should be considered as a Refusal Notice, and the request has therefore been closed. 

Advice and assistance
You may wish to submit a refined request in order that the cost of complying with your request may be facilitated within the ‘appropriate limit’. In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, we have considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit.

Unfortunately due to the reasoning set out above, we are unable to offer any further refinement for these requests.