In relation to the 2007/08 financial year please answer the following questions:

a) How many people were charged with possession of cannabis (in any of its forms)?

b) How many people were given a caution, youth final warning or a youth reprimand for possession of cannabis (in any of its forms)? 

The attached spreadsheet details the number of people arrested for possession of cannabis and the release description. The ages of the individuals have been provided such that you can extract those which fall within your categorisation of ‘youth’ as this detail is not specified within the release description.

 

c) How many people were given a street warning for possession of cannabis (in any of its forms)?Your request for information has now been considered and I am not obliged to supply the information you have requested. Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires South Yorkshire Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which:  

(a) states that fact;

(b) specifies the exemption in question and;

(c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies. 

The following exemption applies to the disclosure of the information: 

Section 12 – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit. 

These records are not held electronically on any of our systems and would therefore involve a manual trawl of paper documents in order to determine whether the warning was relative to ‘cannabis’ and thus extract the data you require.  The cost associated with doing that is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the (ACPO:  Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004)  (ACPOS:  Freedom of Information (Fees for Required Disclosure)(Scotland) Regulations 2004 and Freedom of Information (Fees for disclosure under section 13)(Scotland) Regulations 2004).  

I hope the information we have provided is of help to your enquiries and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest in South Yorkshire Police.