Use of Force (591A/20)
Request
As you will be aware, police forces are required to collect information on Use of Force, which includes tactics used and the ethnicity of the subject. Please could you provide me with:
1) The total number of times Use of Force was used for the period January to March 2020. Please break this total number down by tactic and present the information in an Excel spreadsheet. Ideally this should look like:
January to March 2020
Tasers used: 5
Batons: 10
Dogs: 2
Total Use of Force: 12
Please note, there are of course many more tactics than this. The link I provided gives a full list, but you may have your own.
2) Please provide details of the ethnicity of the subjects that Use of Force tactics were used against. Using the preceding example table, this should look like:
January to March 2020
Tasers used: 5 Asian: 1 White: 4
Batons: 10 Black: 1 White: 9
Dogs: 2 White: 2
Please present this information in an Excel spreadsheet. Please use ethnicity codes, if you would like, but please provide me with a key for that. If you cannot, for operational or cost reasons, provide the ethnicity of subject for each tactic, please provide the ethnicity breakdown for the total number of tactics e.g.
January to March 2020
Total Use of Force: 12 Asian: 2 Black: 3 White: 7
3) Please repeat requests 1 and 2 for the time period April to June 2020. If you do not yet have data for this entire period, please provide it for the months you do have.
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.