Cannabis Offences (250A/23)
Request
1) The number of under-18s arrested by your police force for drug offences involving cannabis edibles or gummies, year-by-year, from 1 January 2021 to 31 January 2023
2) The total number of arrests by your police force for drug offences involving cannabis edibles or gummies, year-by-year, from 1 January 2021 to 31 January 2023
If you cannot distinguish between cannabis-related arrests and cannabis edibles-related arrests within the cost limit, please could you instead provide:
3) The number of under-18s arrested by your police force for cannabis offences, year-by-year, from 1 January 2021 to 31 January 2023
4) The total number of arrests by your police force for cannabis offences, year-by-year, from 1 January 2021 to 31 January 2023
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. This is because we do not have any flags, markers, or recording categories to identify whether the arrest involved cannabis edibles or gummies. Therefore, in order to determine this information we would need to manually review each individual custody record for cannabis offences. We have recorded 17,489 arrests for cannabis offences since 2021, however, at an estimated 3 minutes to review each record this would take approximately 874 hours to complete which would far 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 questions 3 and 4. Please see attached document (250A_Attachment).
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.
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.