999/101 Calls (1334A/22)
Request
Could you please provide answers to the questions below for years 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and if possible, 2022 so far.
1a) How many 999 calls did you take overall, annually?
1b) How many 999 calls annually were identified as being mental ill-health related?
2a) How many 101 calls did you take overall, annually?
2b) How many 101 calls were identified as mental ill-health related?
3a) How many incidents did you deal with in total, annually?
3b) How many incidents were identified as mental ill-health related?
4a) Did you have any mental health triage experts (and/or triage vehicles) designated to deal with mental ill-health incidents for any of these years?
4b) If yes to 4a, how many times was a mental health triage expert (and/or triage vehicle) deployed out each year?
Answers should include both police responding to someone in a mental ill-health crisis where there is no crime involved, and criminal incidents where someone involved has a mental ill-health problem.
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 under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. In relation to question 4b, this information is not centrally collated. This means that in order to identify relevant information we would have to search our incident database for the vehicles used by the Triage team to identify if the specified resources were despatched or despatched/arrived. However, because incidents can now have more multiple resource types, we would have to manually review each of these records. To conduct this manual search however, would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
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, under Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide information for the remainder of your request as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached document.
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.