Complaints (86A/22)
Request
How many complaints were made against WM Police in the years 2018 – 2021 regarding
- Direct discrimination of a homophobic nature against WM police?
- Direct discrimination of a disabled nature against WM police?
- Of that total how many included complaints made against Coventry Police?
- How many were upheld and not upheld.
- Reasons for being upheld, reasons for not being upheld?
- For those upheld, why were they upheld?
- If against an officer and upheld what was the outcome?
Response
Unfortunately, our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
However, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see attached file 86A_22_attachment.pdf). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
REASON FOR DECISION
Q1 & Q2 – For complaint cases recorded between 2018 and February 2020 the only way for us to identify all complaints specifically relating to sexual orientation or disability would be to manually review every ‘discriminatory behaviour’ case. Such a search though would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
However, in order to assist in providing you with data prior to February 2020, we have conducted a keyword search of the allegation summary in order to try and capture some relevant results for this period, but it is important to note that this search may not have captured every complaint of the types requested.
From February 2020 onward however, the complaint category ‘discriminatory behaviour’ included sub-types allowing us to more easily identify sexual orientation / disability cases from our systems and therefore we have been able to provide accurate data from that time.
Additionally, with regard to questions 5 and 6. This information is not easily/electronically retrievable, therefore to be able to answer this would require a full review of the investigation for all of the Complaints. This however would require a manual examination of records and such a search would once again exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of compliance with the whole of your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12(1) of the FOI Act 2000. For West Midlands Police, the appropriate limit is set at £450, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, S.I. 3244.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: