Question 1. 

£20,000 

Question 2. 

£580 approx. 

Questions 3. & 4.

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. 

South Yorkshire Police does not hold readily available information that correlates data concerning arrests and convictions with the operation of the CCTV camera mentioned in your request. The records of persons taken into custody (‘Custody Records') broadly comprise of two different sections. The section concerned with personal details, reason for arrest/detention (i.e. the actual offence committed) and for recording certain decisions in relation to the persons treatment upon first attendance at a Police Station are recorded on a computer system. In the main this computer system can be easily searched to locate, retrieve and extract certain information. The remainder of the ‘Custody Record' consists of a hand written record of all information relating to (amongst other matters) the reasons for the persons arrest including any evidence there may be against them available at that time. 

In order to locate, retrieve and extract this information it would be necessary to carry out a physical review of all ‘Custody Records' within the Force in order to establish whether the arrest of that person was directly attributable, whether in whole or in part, to the operation of the CCTV camera in question. 

It would be necessary to conduct a force-wide search as the arrest of a person outside the ambit of the CCTV camera in question would not automatically preclude its evidential value to the investigation. For instance, a person may commit an offence at any location but pass within the view of the camera at any time prior to or after the offence rendering any recording of potential evidential value.    

Such a search would not guarantee a definitive answer to your request as the discovery of any evidence may sometimes be made at the later stage of an investigation and not therefore recorded on the ‘Custody Record'. 

It would then be necessary to carry out searches of other systems concerned with the management of prosecution processes to establish which, if any, of those persons were convicted of offences. A physical review of prosecution files and court papers would then be required to establish whether evidence from the CCTV camera in question was adduced and whether that evidence was a contributory factor to the conviction.

The CCTV camera in question was installed around 1999/2000 since that date South Yorkshire Police have created, on average, 50,000 records on the Custody Handling System per year. A conservative estimate to review, retrieve and extract the information from each of these records is between 10 and 20 minutes per record. 

The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 provide that the cost limit for non central government public authorities is £450. This must be calculated at the rate of £25 per hour, providing an effective time limit of 18 hours. 

Question 5. 

Yes