Officer tested Positive for Covid-19 (1166A/20)
Request
How many police officers (PCs) on the force have tested for coronavirus up to December 3.
Can you provide the month of each positive test?
Can you please categorise them by rank?
I did send out a similar request in September – I’m now looking for an up to date picture.
As per your previous request we have categorised them by rank to include PC’s, PCSO’s and Specials
Response
Under section 21 of the Act, we are not required to provide some of the information in response to a request if it is already reasonably accessible to you. Therefore some of the information you requested is available in you previous request which contained the same question FOI 806A/20. Therefore we have run the data from 1st October 2020 to 10th December only.
Please find this link to your previous request as published on our FOI site:
https://foi.west-midlands.police.uk/officer-covid-test-806a-20/
We can confirm that some relevant information is held by West Midlands Police. However, while the majority of the information is attached to this email I am afraid that I am not required to release all of the information requested.
Please note that the figures that you previously received were not broken down into individual ranks as at that stage we were unable to perform this search. However we are now able to perform this, but it is exempt by virtue of S40 (2), as where a higher rank is showing as having had tested positive, due to the low numbers in that rank it may identify that individual. For this reason All Police Officers will be one cumulative figure.
| Month | Rank | Total Positives tests | ||||
| PC | Staff | PCSO | Special | |||
| October | 102 | 38 | 4 | 6 | 150 | |
| November | 110 | 58 | 7 | 0 | 175 | |
| December (up to 10th) | 19 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 20 | |
| Total | 231 | 97 | 11 | 6 | 345 | |
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.
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.
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