Racism incidents in football (373A/23)
Request
- The number of incidents reported to your force during the last ten years that have involved an allegation of racism in a football context, either at a football match or involving football fans, elsewhere and online. Please could you share the figures in separate tables, split into each calendar year.
2. That information broken down into the date of the report, details of the incident and what football team was involved.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide some of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
Before January 2021 this information has not been stored in a retrievable format. Therefore, in order to retrieve this data prior to this date would mean an individual search of each racist reported crime / arrest to see if it had occurred at a football match and then which match and the offence etc.
January 2021 and beyond this data is available.
There are in excess of 1000 records to be searched x 10 mins per record = 166 hours
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 – 373A 23 attachment). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fee’s regulations for the remainder of the request.