2022/25290 - Strip Searches on vulnerable adults

REQUEST

1. How many strip searches (stop and search and/or in custody) were carried out by your officers on vulnerable adults in:

(2017,2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)?

Please note vulnerable adults includes adults with mental health problems and learning disabilities and falls under the below definition:

A vulnerable adult is any person aged 18 years or over who is or may be in need of community services by reason of mental, physical or learning disability, age or illness AND is or may be unable to take care of themselves or unable to protect themselves against significant harm or exploitation.

2. Of the above, how many resulted in charges (2017,2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)?

3. How many strip searches were carried out by your officers on vulnerable adults (same definition as above) without an appropriate adult present in the past 5 calendar years:

(2017,2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)?

RESPONSE

There is no filter currently to identify the number of vulnerable adults who have been strip searched. A manual trawl would need to be completed to identify this data. There are over 622 strip searches recorded just in custody in 2021 alone, and it would take around 2 minutes per record to check each record, which would be over the 18-hour limit (622 records x 2 minutes per record / 60 = over 20 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.