Community Action

Request Number: FOI/16444

Category: Operational policing, Investigations and Events - Events and Public Order

Subject: Community Action

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:
ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/guide-to-managing-an-foi-request/charging-a-fee-and-cost-limits/

Request
In regards to incidents of "community action" - forced evictions / public demonstrations and protests outside homes.

Request 1
Can the PSNI say how many of these incidents they have attended? Can you give a detailed breakdown per year?
Clarification Sought
Can you please provide a date range for this part of your request?
Clarification Received
Previous five years, broke down monthly if possible

Request 2
What do these incidents fall under? Public order?

Request 3
Is there any criminality associated with such gatherings?

Request 4
How many arrests have taken place during these gatherings?

Request 5
Have there been any prosecutions?

Request 6
What level of policing response is needed to handle these situations?

Request 7
Can you give a breakdown of officers / police time required in the last 12 months for these sort of incidents?

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.
Whilst the information you seek is held electronically by the PSNI, it is not held in a format that would allow its retrieval without manual intervention. To extract the data you have sought in your request would require a manual trawl of PSNI’s records – hence putting the request grossly over the 18 hour cost limit set out under the FOIA.

This matter will be over cost.

Keyword searches are an unreliable method of collecting data because they rely on searching through unstructured data. This means that we cannot automatically determine the context of the term found in the search result and a manual review is almost always required to decide if the result meets the criteria of the FOI – this often causes FOIs to go over cost. For unstructured data fields we also cannot rely on the data having been entered in such a way as to identify those records that are relevant. Spelling mistakes, abbreviations and aliases can all affect the reliability of a keyword search. In addition, we do not have the ability to search for keywords within external documents.

The retrieval process for this request would require a manual review of each record (each of which may have multiple linked offences).  There has been upward of 365,000 recorded crime over the last five years.  Therefore to examine this excessive amount of records, would exceed the 18 hour cost limit even if it took a minimum of 5 minute to review each record.

Advice and assistance
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 we are unable to offer you a refinement.