PSNI FOI requests

Request Number: FOI/16670

Category: Organisational Information & Performance - Security and Data Protection

Subject: PSNI FOI requests

Request and Answer:
Your request for information has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Act we can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) does hold information to which your request relates. The decision has been taken to disclose the following.

Request
I wanted to access a full list of the FOI requests sent to the PSNI since the Act came into force, but was asked to break them down to 12 month periods or less.

It would be really helpful to get as many as possible, and have a spreadsheet with dates of the FOI, request detail and outcome.

Would it possible to get them from time periods going further back? Could you let me know what other dates could work?

Clarification Requested: I made some FOI requests to your organisation before but was only able to get requests from 1st January to August 2024. Could I get records of requests going further back? 

Clarification Received: Ideally, Id like them as far back as possible to analyse, but happy to break them down into separate requests if it hits the cost limit.

Clarification Requested: We would be able to provide you with FOIs from 2015 - 2026 that list the Reference Number, Date Received, Summary of Request and Outcome/Request Disposition - would this be suitable for your research?

Clarification Received: Yes, that would be great if you could do that. That would work perfectly for my research.

Answer
Please see attached spreadsheet containing a list of FOIs received by PSNI from 2015 - 2026*

*Data has been extracted from Infreemation (Corporate Information Branch's current case management software) which contains an export of data held on AccessPro (Corporate Information Branch's previous case management software), however data is only held from December 2015. This is due to Corporate Information Branch transitioning between different case manager systems and such legacy system is no longer accessible. Furthermore, this data is subject to the PSNI’s Records, Review and Retention schedule and will likely no longer be held.

 A number of the oldest requests are test cases that could not be deleted from AccessPro and have subsequently transferred into the new case manager system.

Please note this data was extracted from a ‘live database’, using a report to capture the information held on the system and the outcome code used when closing the request. It should be further noted that the data entered for the summary field is manually entered and the outcome selected is from a select list that requires a ‘manual process’ undertaken by a Decision Maker, therefore within the data you should allow for any human error.