Tasers (1544A/21)
Request
- How many times was a Taser deployed in any way and – as a separate number – how many times fired/discharged by your police force in the periods:
a) 1st April 2017 to 31st March 2018
b) 1st April 2018 to 31st March 2019
c) 1st April 2019 to 31st March 2020
d) 1st April 2020 to 31st March 2021?
- In what number or percentages of deployments and – as a separate figure – discharges did the person:
a) have mental health problems
b) have acute behavioural disturbance
c) was under the influence of alcohol without mental health problems
d) was under the influence of drugs without mental health problems?
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. This is because data for 2017/18 is not held in a centrally recorded format and would therefore require a manual review of records in order to retrieve this.
This means that the cost of providing you with the information 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.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
However, in accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide the information requested for the remaining years as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached document.
In addition, use of force statistics for question 1a) – c) are published on the Home Office website at the following link (page 13 of the ‘data tables’ document refers):
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/police-use-of-force-statistics
Some further figures for 2017/18 have previously been published on our disclosure log at the link below which you may find useful.
https://foi.west-midlands.police.uk/taser-218a-20/
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.