A police force has rejected a weekly newspaper’s Freedom of Information request about the axeing of a patrol car – despite admitting holding the necessary information in its archives.
Leicestershire Police turned down the Loughborough Echo’s request for information about its squad car based in the town of Shepshed, claiming the time it would have taken to answer one part of the question exceeded the four-week time limit set out in the Freedom of Information Act.
The force said this meant the whole request was considered exempt under the terms of the Act, and declined to answer any elements of the paper’s submission.
The Echo asked for a breakdown of incidents which the patrol car, which has been withdrawn from service due to “cuts” and was allegedly being “under-used” by officers, had attended in the past year.
A car similar to the one scrapped in Shepshed
However, the force said this would have required its staff to search through every single incident logged across the whole of Leicestershire during that period.
The newspaper further asked how long the car had been based in Shepshed, how many times it had been used in the past three years, whether all the town’s police officers had frees use of a pedal cycle and how officers now travel to Loughborough police station or the force’s headquarters, near Leicester.
Answering the submission, Steven Morris, information management for Leicestershire Police, said: “I can confirm that this force does hold the information you have requested.
“Under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 we are obliged to respond to a request unless it would take over 18 hours work to answer. Therefore if one element of the request goes over the time limit allocated, the whole request is considered to be exempt.
“Most requests for service to the police are recorded as incidents on our command and control system, these incidents are responded to by both response and neighbourhood officers (including those based at Shepshed and those based at other offices).
“In the case of neighbourhood officers responding to incident, the contact management centre records the details of the attending officer but not necessarily the car they attended in (or indeed whether they utilised a bicycle, car or attended on foot) against the incident record.
“In order to establish an accurate answer to question three it would be necessary to review every incident responded to by Leicestershire Police for the time period given and then establish for each incident whether the Shepshed police car attended.”
“In order to retrieve the information you have requested would therefore be in excess of the 18 hours specified by the Home Office as the time period for which a police force should allocate to a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.”
The Echo declined to comment on the force’s rejection of the FoI when approached by HTFP, but it is understood the paper has considered putting in a supplementary request following the rejection.
Last month the same force criticised the Leicester Mercury for publishing a photograph of a serial paedophile on its front page.
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How quickly the police forget they are public servants, paid by us, to enforce the law on our behalf. This kind of behaviour flies in the face of democratic accountability yet doesn’t seem to trouble them in the slightest. Still, in Minim’s village, residents are so concerned about the lack of a visible policing presence that we’re thinking of holding back the police precept in our council tax and using the funding to do the job ourselves. I hope the Echo pursues this relentlessly as key issues are at stake. Good luck.
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To be fair, it does sound as if the paper was asking for an awful lot of research by the police – checking through logs for every call which involved sending that particular vehicle.
And really does anyone care whether it was used 10, 20 etc times?
It smacks of the misuse of FOIs by young inexperienced journalists doing little more than a trawl exercise.
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That sounds like a completely standard and reasonable FOI rejection to me – the phrase that they hold the information is just confirming that if they were to do the research, the answer would be in their files somewhere, not that it’s already sitting ready to send to the reporter but they’re refusing to do it.
The reporter needs to resubmit a pared down version, or do it in chunks
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Seems a fairly pointless request in the great scheme of things.
If it’s going to be a story about wasted resources, perhaps the journalist in question should consider how much police time they have taken up in pursuing information they already had.
Looks like a dead-end of a story to me.
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@ Dick Minim, I think you’ve forgotten that the police are servants of the wider public, not just the press and I suspect your outrage is simply because Inspector Knacker has dared to refuse a request from a reporter, quite reasonably in my opinion. I realise that some forces routinely attempt to block FOI requests as a matter of course which should be challenged whenever reasonable requests are made. This is not such a request.
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Surely the police would have this sort of information to hand before arriving at the decision to axe the patrol car?
Or were they just acting on a hunch?
It strikes me that this is an entirely legitimate line of questioning but Plod does like to dig its heels in on the daftest of whims.
They just don’t get it that they serve us and they are accountable.
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And what a classic line from the paper – refusing to comment! Just imagine their outrage if it was the police refusing to comment on a story.
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If the boot was on the other foot would the Loughborough Echo allocate a number of staff to search archives for more than 18 hours to find a similar level of detail? Probably not. Without knowing all the background, I cannot be sure this was best use of FoI, although I suspect it was not. If the Echo had a reasonable working relationship with Leicestershire Police a simple interview may have been granted, producing much, if not all, of the information required. The sledgehammer approach is not always the most effective.
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FOI for the sake of FOI.
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Can we all agree on a style of FoI (nor FOI) and MoT etc?
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