Covid Arrests and FPNs (190A/21)
Request
1) All COVID-19 Related Arrests (custody records where either a COVID-19 offence is listed on the front sheet or recorded as an offence) made in Birmingham in the period of time going from March 1st 2020 to January 1st 2021. Please break down the data by district, type of offence and ethnicity of the offender. Also, I’d be grateful if you could provide weekly figures for the offences in question.
2) All COVID-19 Related FPNs (Fixed Notice Penalties) issued (or sent to ACRO for approval) in the 10 Manchester Metropolitan Boroughs in the period going from March 1st 2020 to January 1st 2021. Please break down the data by district, type of offence and ethnicity of the offender. Also, I’d be grateful if you could provide weekly figures for the offences in question.
We asked you to clarify the below points on 25/02/2021:
- a) Where you have specified “Birmingham” in question 1, do you mean the city centre or the whole area? Please be advised that the location field on our arrest database is a free text field which means the entries are usually vague or localised locations (e.g. “outside John’s chippy” or “M6”). As a result, searching this field for “Birmingham” is unlikely to yield many results. Alternatively, we may be able to search for arrests that were brought into Perry Barr custody (as this is the most central location) however, this will not be indicative of the location in which the arrest took place because arrests are taken to the nearest custody block that has availability. Please can you advise how you would like us to proceed with this search?
- b) We are not sure what you mean by “on the front sheet”? We do not have markers for Covid arrests so we are only able to retrieve arrests for offences which are under the covid legislation.
Please can you confirm if this is the search you would like?
- c) In relation to question 2, I note you have requested the location “the 10 Manchester Metropolitan Boroughs” however, did you mean Birmingham?
We received your clarification on 01/03/2021:
Please find the answers to your questions below.
- a) Please, search for arrests that were brought into Perry Barr custody.
- b) I can confirm that is the search I would like you to conduct (arrests under Covid legislation).
- c) Apologies for the mistake. I did indeed mean Birmingham.
Response
Please find attached our response.
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.