Drug Arrests (1010A/23)
Request
This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, regarding arrests for drug offences.
Please share the following information for the financial years between 2015/16 up to and including 2022/23:
Q1) The number of under 18s arrested for drug offences, broken down into financial years (e.g. 2015/16, 2016/17 etc) and a grand total. (All nationalities, including UK)
Q2) The number of under 18s who are non-UK nationals arrested for drug offences, broken down into financial years (e.g. 2015/16, 2016/17 etc) and a grand total.
Q3) The number of under 16s arrested for drug offences, broken down into financial years (e.g. 2015/16, 2016/17 etc) and a grand total. (All nationalities, including UK).
Q4) The number of under 16s who are non-UK nationals arrested for drug offences, broken down into financial years (e.g. 2015/16, 2016/17 etc) and a grand total.
Q5) The number of under 18s arrested for drug offences, broken down by nationality.
Q6) The number of under 18s who are non-UK nationals arrested for drug offences, broken down by offence type.
Q7) The youngest under 18 non-UK national to be arrested for drug possession, and the youngest under 18 to be arrested for supplying. Please include the year of arrests (in financial years).
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of the requested information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. With regard to questions 2, 4 & 6, we do not have any markers or recording categories to allow us to easily identify non-UK nationals on our recording database prior to 2018. This means that in order to identify this information we would need to conduct a manual review of each individual record. However, this would involve hundreds of records, therefore, to conduct this manual search 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 this request as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please find this information attached (1010A_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:
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. 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.