Gun Confiscations (1067A/22)
Request
I was wondering if you could provide me with the following information regarding gun confiscations, recoveries and those handed in by amnesty or other made by your force between 2021 – 2022.
1) Please may you provide the number of guns, ammunition and any other live ammunition weapons such as grenades that you took off the streets between August 2021 – August 2022.
2) Please may you provide the types of weapons recovered – were they pistols, automatics, semi automatics.
3) Any photos you have of large hauls/standout hauls from this period.
4) Any photos that you have of standout evidence such as unusual weapons, fully automatic rifles from this period.
5) If neither of the above apply, please just provide a few photos of the weapons recovered.
6) And please explain what happens to weapons once confiscated.
7) And please may you provide a simple figure of gun confiscations, recoveries and those handed in by amnesty or other made by your force between August 2020 – August 2021 for comparison. Don’t need pictures for these, just figures.
Response
In relation to questions 1, 2, 6 & 7, please find attached our response.
In relation to questions 3 – 5, please find attached our response for images that have been published. However, for any images not already published / released into public domain, this information is exempt by virtue of the following exemption:
Section 30(1) – Investigations and proceedings conducted by public authorities
This exemption and explanatory notes are shown here:
Section 30 relates to investigations in general terms and covers information that has been held by a public authority gathered at any time in relation to a specific investigation, criminal or otherwise. In this case the information you have requested would have been gathered only for the purposes of an investigation and is therefore exempt from disclosure under FOIA legislation.
In accordance with the Act, this letter represents a Refusal Notice for this part of the request.
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.