Officers Not Fully Deployable (57A/23)
Request
- How many West Midlands Police officers, to date, are classified as “not fully deployable”?
- Please break down this figure you provide to reveal how many officers are not fully deployable because of (i) performance concerns; (ii) physical issues and (iii) mental health issues.
- Please further break down these figures for (i) performance concerns and (ii) physical issues to reveal the reasons recorded – 100 officers with X performance concerns and 100 with Y etc.
- I also seek information on the duration these officers have not been fully deployable. If you hold information that breaks down the time they have not been fully deployable, please provide it. I have in mind a report showing how many of them have not been fully deployable for at least one month, three months, six months etc.
- Please provide raw statistical data on the number of officers who have not been fully deployable for the longest time. I have in mind two columns. Column 1 includes the numbers 1 to 20, and column 2 includes a time period adjacent to each number.
- How many West Midlands Police officers are on restricted duties or suspended because they have been accused of serious misconduct?
- Please break down this figure as granular as your records permit to show the serious misconduct they have been accused of?
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all this information within the appropriate (cost) limit of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
However, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see attached file 57A_23_attachment.pdf). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder 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.
REASON FOR DECISION
Although we have been able to provide the requested information for questions 1,2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 (attached), we are only able to provide partial information for question 3. This is because, for officers in the ‘Restriction Mismatch’ category, although by definition all will be restricted due to either being ill, injured or have restrictions to deployment applied for medical reasons, it is not possible to determine the specific detail as requested, without manually going through each of the 123 individuals’ occupational health records. Such a search however, when combined with the time taken so far for the other parts of this request (approximately 11 hours) would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of compliance with the whole of your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12(1) of the FOI Act 2000. For West Midlands Police, the appropriate limit is set at £450, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, S.I. 3244.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here.