Police custody images 09/2025

FOI Reference: 9/2025

Request

With reference to any custody images of people who have not been charged or convicted that are currently being stored in the police national database, please could you give me a breakdown by religion and ethnicity?

If the data is held, please could you give me two separate breakdowns (a column for religion and a column for ethnicity)? If information on religion is not recorded, please could you just give me a breakdown by ethnicity?

If this information is not held, either entirely or partly, please could you advise me whether it might be recorded or held by another body?

Further amendment received

I’d like to make a correction in my request from the police national database to your locally held database please.

Below is my amended request in full. Please let me know if you need any further clarification from me.

With reference to any custody images of people who have not been charged or convicted that are currently being stored in your locally held database, please could you give me a breakdown by religion and ethnicity?

If the data is held, please could you give me two separate breakdowns (a column for religion and a column for ethnicity)? If information on religion is not recorded, please could you just give me a breakdown by ethnicity?

Please could you also include a brief note to indicate how long each person's image has been on the database? Additionally, if it is within the time and cost limit, please could you also include a note about whether each one has been cleared or if they are still awaiting trial?

Ideally I'd like to get information about all images currently stored on your database at the moment, but if a timeframe is required, please could you provide information for images captured from 1 January 2020 to the date of this request?

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 2,059 hours) to comply with your request. The regulations can be located @ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/3244

The Freedom of Information department has been advised that some of the information in respect of your request is not held in an easily retrievable format.

We would need to go into each Custody record and review each one individually, due to the fact that we cannot distinguish between Custody images and other images.

In order to distinguish between the out of court disposal used, we would need to review each individual crime occurrence.

In light of this and in order to accurately obtain the information relative to your request for the time frame stipulated it would involve Dyfed Powys Police accessing and manually reviewing 17,653 records that are recorded within the time period (15/05/2023 onwards), since the implementation of Niche system.  Any data prior to the commencement of Niche is not retrievable, as we cannot identify Custody images only.

It has also been established that it would take a minimum of 7 minutes to review and obtain the information for a single record in respect of your request.

The process outlined results in the below time estimate:-

17,653 Records x 7 minutes per record = 2,059 hours

Time estimate to complete task = 2,059 hours

In accordance therefore 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 the Freedom of Information Unit. Please also be advised that should the request be refined, it does not remove the public authorities right to cite exemptions if relevant.

(This is a response under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and disclosed on 14/02/2025)