2022/25485 - Number of arrests
REQUEST
- How many people has your force arrested under the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Act 2022 between 9 September 2022 and 19 September 2022? Please include whether or not people were charged, broken down by age, race and gender.
- How many people has your force arrested under the Public Order Act 1986 between 9 September 2022 and 19 September 2022? Please include whether or not people were charged, broken down by age, race and gender.
- How many people has your force arrested under the Public Order Act 1936 between 9 September 2022 and 19 September 2022? Please include whether or not people were charged, broken down by age, race and gender.
- How many Breach of the Peace arrests did your force make between 9 September 2022 and 19 September 2022? Please include whether or not people were charged, broken down by age, race and gender.
- Has your force received any complaints between 9 September 2022 and 19 September 2022? If so, please share how many and the details for each complaint e.g. excessive use of force.
- If it does not push this request over the cost limit, please share how many anti-monarchy protestors your force arrested between 9 September 2023 and 19 September 2022.
RESPONSE
- How many people has your force arrested under the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Act 2022 between 9 September 2022 and 19 September 2022? Please include whether or not people were charged, broken down by age, race and gender.
Police, Crime, Courts, and Sentencing Act 2022 is so vast we are unable to filter a certain Crime. There is no filter for legislative acts to identify how many people have been arrested for the dates requested. If you are able to refine the search request to a specific crime, we can use the filters to gather the data.
- How many people has your force arrested under the Public Order Act 1986 between 9 September 2022 and 19 September 2022? Please include whether or not people were charged, broken down by age, race and gender.
Same as question 3.
- How many people has your force arrested under the Public Order Act 1936 between 9 September 2022 and 19 September 2022? Please include whether or not people were charged, broken down by age, race and gender.
The Public Order Act 2022 is so vast, we are unable to filter crimes or arrests. There is no filter for legislative acts to identify how many people have been arrested for the dates requested. If you are able to refine the search request to a specific crime, we can use the filters to gather the data. The Public Order Act 1936 has been updated to the Public Order Act 1986 and is up to date as of today. There is also a Public Order Bill as of 2022. The Public Order Bill builds on the public order measures in Part 3 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 which, amongst other things, updates the powers in the 1986 Act enabling the police to impose conditions on a protest, provides for a statutory offence of intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance and increases the maximum penalty for the offence of wilful obstruction of a highway.
- How many Breach of the Peace arrests did your force make between 9 September 2022 and 19 September 2022? Please include whether or not people were charged, broken down by age, race and gender.
The table below shows the date for Breach of the Peace arrests made between 09/09/2022 and 19/09/2022. All Offenders were of White British Ethnicity and all Offenders ‘Not Charged’. Please note that the data provided in this table is based on custody footfall, this means that if someone was arrested for multiple ‘Breach of Peace’ they will only be counted once as they were arrested once. If arrested for the same offence separate times they will be counted each time they came to custody.
- Has your force received any complaints between 9 September 2022 and 19 September 2022? If so, please share how many and the details for each complaint e.g., excessive use of force.
For this request you will need to contact the IOPC (Independent Office for Police Conduct) for Wales, Public Authorities.
- If it does not push this request over the cost limit, please share how many anti-monarchy protestors your force arrested between 9 September 2023 and 19 September 2022.
There is no filter to identify if there are any ‘anti-monarchy protesters. In order to find this information, a manual trawl would have to be completed on each arrest. The search returned 260 arrests for the dates provided (09/09/22 to 19/09/2022), each summary would need to be checked to ensure it meets the requirements of this request. This would exceed the timeframe of 18 hours as each record would take approximately 5 minutes to view, this request is over the 18 hours and would therefore be exempt.
260 records x 5 minutes per viewing / 60 minutes = 21+ hours.
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.