Section 127 of the Communications Act (1367A/21)
Request
Please may you provide the annual count for your Constabulary of arrests, charges, number of offenders and suspects released on bail or released without charge under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 from 2010 to date. I request a breakdown of the gender of the victims in aggregated form i.e. 50 complainants are men, 76 are women. I do not require any data that could identify a living person. If information for 2021 is not yet fully available, please identify what is currently available and provide as much as possible.
Response
Please find attached our response.
Please note: the outcomes provided are all the outcomes that we can provide under released without charge.
RESPONSE
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
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). 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
Please note that researching each individual case would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12). We are unable to provide information on victims, as we do not record this information within our arrest database, we would need to conduct a manual search of all relevant records in order to locate and retrieve this information which would exceed the FOI time limit.
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.