PSD Personnel (543A/20 )
Request
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request information on your complaints team. Please provide answers to the following:
1. How many people work for the team or teams which deal with public complaints against the force and specific officers / staff members?
2. Of the above, how many employees are:
(a) white
(b) non-white
(c) ethnicity unknown
3. Please provide a breakdown of the figures for non-white staff from the question above by ethnicity.
Response
We can confirm that some relevant information is holding relation to Question 3 by West Midlands Police. However, we are withholding that information since it is exempt by virtue of the following exemptions
Section 40 (2) – Personal Information
Section 40 (2) allows for personal data to be withheld where release would breach the third party’s data protection rights. It would be unfair to release this information where any person could be identified from the data and in this case the right to privacy outweighs any public interest in release.
In relation to Question 1 and 2 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.