Arrests/Charges relating to social media

Request Number: FOI/16141

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Crime Statistics

Subject: Arrests/Charges relating to social media

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:

Requests where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit (section 12) | ICO

Question 1
Please provide the total number of arrests and charges made between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2024 under each of the following: The Malicious Communications Northern Ireland Order 1988, and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. 

Question 2
Social media communications -  If your records allow, please indicate how many of the above arrests or charges involved online or electronic communications, including posts or messages on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Snapchat, or similar. 

If you do not hold a dedicated “social media” field, please provide the number of arrests and/or charges in 2024 under the same legislation where the incident description, notes, or summary contain any of the following keywords “Facebook”, “Twitter”, “X”, “Instagram”, “TikTok”, “WhatsApp”, “Snapchat”, “social media”, “online”, or “internet” 

Time frame flexibility -  If full-year 2024 data are not yet compiled, please provide the most recent 12-month period available.

Please provide the data in a spreadsheet format CSV or XLSX with columns showing: Year, Offence e.g. Act / Section, Arrests, Charges, Indicator of online or social-media involvement. - If recorded or found via keywords

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.

For question 1, there were 503 arrests under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 where a person was arrested and processed through custody for at least one offence under this legislation, 224 of which resulted in subsequent charge. There were 5 arrests under The Malicious Communications Northern Ireland Order 1988 where a person was arrested and processed through custody for at least one offence under this legislation, 2 of which resulted in subsequent charge. To answer Questions 2 and 3 would require a manual examination of all the custody records to determine if the arrests/charges were linked to online or electronic communications including social media platforms. This information is not held in a retrievable format, key words searches are not always a reliable method to search for data as it is dependent on how the information was input into the system. At an estimate of 5 minutes to check each record would require approximately 42 hours of work and therefore puts your request grossly over the cost limits set out in FOIA.

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. 

We are unable to offer a refinement