Protests (562A/21)
Request
For March 2020 onwards, information on every planned protest or march (‘protest’) in your area that police have been formally made aware of, including:
- Whether the protest was authorised by the police, 2. The purpose or affiliation of the protest, 3. The date and location of the protest, 4. Whether the protest took place, 5. If the protest took place:
a). The number of arrests made at the protest, b). The number of cautions made at the protest, c). Whether any fine was issued to the organisers.
If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the information exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, it would be great if you could provide advice and assistance, under Section 16, as to how I can better word the request.
Response
Please find attached our response.
Please note: The police do not authorise or grant permission for ‘protests’, therefore we are unable to answer question 1.
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.