Missing Persons (474A/22)
Request
- A breakdown of the total number of calls made to West Midlands Police that were reportinga missing person for the following years:
2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
Please breakdown the number of calls by:
- Risk level from low, medium and high;
- The number of calls where the person was of no risk or absent;
- The number of persons that were found in the corresponding risk groups;
Please clearly differentiate between the number of reports made and the number of persons found.
And if there was a call made reporting the same missing persons, please only include as one to avoid duplication.
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not available in a readily retrievable format. In relation to calls made to West Midlands Police that were reporting a missing person, each incident log would need to be located, retrieved and the summary reviewed to see if such detail was contained within the summary of the incident.
Therefore, 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 information in relation to the total of missing person’s recorded as missing / found by risk category as recorded on our missing person database.
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: