2022/24997 - Palestine Protests

REQUEST

How many attacks on police have there been at Palestine protests in the last 12 months?

RESPONSE

To get this information we would need to manually check each offence that was recorded as assault on an emergency worker to check for the ones relating to a police officer and then a Palestine Protest. This would exceed the 18-hour limit as it would take 3-5 minutes to read each record.

445 Assault on an emergency worker offences x 3mins / 60 = 22.25 hours.  Therefore, a Section 12 Excess Cost exemption has been applied.

Section 12 – Excess Cost

The exemption applicable to the information you have requested for this question can be found at Section 12(1) of the Act and this refusal notice is issued under Section 17.

Section 12(1) “does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.” 

In the case of a police force, the appropriate limit is set at £450, which is calculated at £25 per hour (i.e., 18 hours). Gwent Police would have to conduct a manual search to find and extract the information for this question. This would take more than 18 hours of staff time therefore we are unable to answer this question and the exemption is engaged.

As an alternative, we have searched on our systems for assaults on emergency workers between the dates March 2021 and February 2022. We have then conducted a keyword search using the terms ‘protest’ and ‘Palestine’ on the summary of each offence, with the intention of reviewing the ones highlighted as containing the key word to check it met the requirements of the request (checking it was a Police Officer assaulted and so on). The key word search is restricted to the summaries, as a key word search of the full data log is not available. If the key words were not mentioned in the summaries, then it would not be highlighted for us to check.

This keyword search returned no results, so there was nothing to manually review. None of our Assaults on emergency worker offences contained the words ‘protest’ or ‘Palestine’ in the summary.