Public Contact (1127A/20)
Request
1. Please state the number of 999 calls received by your force’s control room in the period 1st April 2019 to 31st October 2020. Please breakdown the number of calls by calendar month.
2. Please state the number of 101 calls received by your force’s control room in the period 1st April 2019 to 31st October 2020. Please break down the number of calls by calendar month.
3a. Does your force have a website facility for the public to report crimes and incidents? Please indicate if it is the Single Online Home system.
3b. Please state the number of online crime/incident submissions received in the period 1st April 2019 to 31st October 2020? Please break down the number of submissions by calendar month.
4. How many webforms did your force receive in total from the public via the force website (total of all contact including crime/incident reporting and general contact etc.) in the period 1st April 2019 to 31st October 2020? Please break down the number of webforms by calendar month.
5. How many external emails from the public were received by the force in the period 1st April 2019 to 31st October 2020? Please break down the number of emails by calendar month.
6a. How many posts in total were made by the public on your force’s social media channels in the period 1st April 2019 to 31st October 2020? Please break down the number of responses by calendar month and by platform e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.
6b. How many social media posts did your force respond to in the period 1st April 2019 to 31st October 2020? Please break down the number of responses by calendar month and by platform e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.
7. What platform does your force use to manage social media contact with the public?
a) Orlo
b) Hootsuite
c) Other
If ‘other’ please name the platform used:
8. Does your force have the ability to manage all public contact (voice, text, social media, email, webforms and instant messenger/WhatsApp) in one platform and is it auditable?
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within 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 1127A_20_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.
REASON FOR DECISION
Information with regard to questions 4, 5 and 6b is not centrally collated. Therefore in order to determine this information we would need to carry out a manual examination of records. Such a search however 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: