Arrests re-racist incidents in Premier League football stadiums (1753A/23)
Request
All arrests related to racist incidents in Premier League football stadiums on match days for the last 3 seasons 20/21, 21/22 and 22/23.
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not available in a readily retrievable format. In relation to 20/21, Information was not centrally held at this time, all racist hate crimes would need to be located, retrieved and manually read to see if the summary notes mentioned Football as the location. To complete this would exceed the cost limit under the FOI Act,
However, during this time it is highly likely that there would be very few arrests as this was the time period when the country was experiencing the Pandemic / National Lock downs and many social activities were suspended.
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 fee’s 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 21/22 –
22/23 and 23/24 to date, I trust you find this useful.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fee’s legislation for any subsequent requests
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: