Police Officers and Naloxone 44/2024
FOI Reference: 44/2024
Request:
1, How many officers work for your police service as of December 2023?
2, Of these, how many carry naloxone?
3, For each of the years 2023, 2022, 2021, how many times did your officers use naloxone on members of the public?
Response:
Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 places two duties on public authorities. Unless exemptions apply, the first duty at Section 1(1)(a) is to confirm or deny whether the information specified in a request is held. The second duty at Section 1(1)(b) is to disclose information that has been confirmed as being held.
I can confirm that the cost of determining whether any information relative to this request is or isn’t held is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond therefore we are withholding the whole of the requested information since we consider that the Section 12 (2) exemption the Cost of Compliance exceeds the Appropriate Limit applies to it.
Where exemptions are relied upon Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Dyfed Powys Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which: (a) states that fact, (b) specifies the exemption in question and (c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies. The following exemption has been applied to the whole of the information you have requested:
Section 12(2) – The cost of compliance exceeds the Appropriate Limit
Section 12(2) states: “…Subsection (1) does not exempt the public authority from its obligation to comply with paragraph (a) of section 1(1) unless the estimated cost of complying with that paragraph alone would exceed the appropriate limit.”
The cost of determining what information is held, if any, relevant to your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the “appropriate level” as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. It is estimated that it would exceed 18 hours (i.e. minimum of 1471 hours) to comply with your request. The regulations can be located @ www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/3244
The Freedom of Information Department has been advised that the information in relation to Question 3 of your request is not held in an easily retrievable format. This is due to the fact that there is no specific searchable category for our custody records in regards to Naloxone or similar. Therefore an individual interrogation of all custody records in order to establish whether there is any relevant data held.
It has been established that there are 17,660 relevant records that would need to be manually reviewed, and it was has been estimated it would take 5 minutes for each individual record to be examined. The relevant time estimates are detailed below:
2021 – 6525 custody records x 5minutes per record= 543.75hours
2022 – 7985 custody records x 5minutes per record= 665.4 hours
2023 (up to 12/05/2023) – 3150 custody records x 5minutes per record= 262.5hours
Therefore total time estimate to complete whole request = 1471.7 hours.
Please note, the reason for the shorter time frame in he 2023 time estimate figures is because a data recording system change means that we currently don’t have access to the data relevant to this request post May 12th 2023, until further data modelling can be undertaken, but it should be noted, that this has little bearing on the time estimate provided, given that an increase in a number of records will only extend the time estimate further outside 18 hour limit.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for the WHOLE of this request under Section 17(5) A public authority which, in relation to any request for information, is relying on a claim that section 12 or section 14 applies must, within the time for complying with section 1(1), give the applicant a notice stating that fact. You may wish to refine and resubmit your request so that it reduces the time shown above to fall within the 18 hours. Should you require any further advice in relation to this matter please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Please also be advised that should the request be refined, it does not remove the Force’s right to cite exemptions if relevant.
Although excess cost removed the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill, I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved or available before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of your request.
Q1.
As of December 2023, we had 1295 Officers in Force.
Q2.
As of the end of December 2023 – 248 Officers had been trained in the use of Naloxone in Dyfed Powys Police. Also policy is now that all new police constables will undertake Naloxone training as part of their first aid training.
It should be noted that as a result of the systems adopted by Dyfed-Powys Police in relation to the recording of such information that the information released may or may not be accurate.
(This is a response under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and disclosed on 28/02/2024)