Overnight Custody (2372/20)
Request
I write to request information regarding your police forces arrangements for fulfilling its obligation under section 38(6) of Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to transfer children to Local Authority Accommodation post charge.
I would be grateful if you could please provide us with the following information for the year 2019:
- How many children (anyone under 18) were held overnight (for 4 or more hours between the hours of 0000 and 0800) in the police station?
- Can you provide a breakdown of those children by their age and ethnicity?
- How many of those children who were held overnight, were held post-charge?
- How many requests were made to the Local authority to accommodate children post-charge under section 38?
- Please provide a breakdown of requests for secure and non-secure accommodation if possible.
- How many children were transferred to local authority accommodation post-charge?
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.