Dog Bites (1152A/20)
Request
I would be grateful if you could please provide me with the following information about “police dog bite” incidents recorded by your force, for each of the following years:
(a) April 1st 2017-March 31st 2018
(b) April 1st 2018-March 31st 2019
(c) April 1st 2019-March 31st 2020
In each of the years listed above:
Q1 How many suspects were bitten by police dogs?
Q2 How many of those [bitten] suspects received compensation (damages, or out-of-court settlements)?
Q3 Please provide a breakdown of each payment (and whether liability was accepted)
Q4 If you are unable to answer Q3, then please state the total amount of payments to suspects for police dog bites
Q5 How many police officers were bitten by police dogs?
Q6 How many members of the public (other than suspects) were bitten by police dogs?
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not all available in a readily retrievable format. With regard to question 1a, we are unable to determine this without conducting a manual review of officers’ records. This is because we would need to extract information from our Use of Force data, however during the specified time period we experienced a change in system resulting in the data not being centralised or easily extractable.
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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
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 relevant information for the remaining questions, as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached document (1152A_Attachment).
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.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.