Arrests for class A & B drugs
Request
The request relates to the time period June 2021 until June 2024.
How many people were arrested for having possession of a controlled drug (without intent to supply), including:
Class A - Powder Cocaine; Amphetamine
Class B - Cannabis and cannabis resin / Cannabinol / Cannabinol derivatives
Please categorise as follows:
People Proceeded Against for the Home Office Classification Code above
broken down by Ethnic Appearance.
If the cost for this research is deemed too high, please reduce the time period to June 2022 until June 2024.
Response
Section 12(1) – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
I approached the administrator for South Yorkshire Police’s Crime Management
System. The initial search of this system returned over 7554 offences based on the following:
Incident Created Date is between 01/06/2021 and 31/05/2024, SYP & crime only filter, HO Sub Sub Group Name is equal to POSSESS OF CONTROL DRUGS
(CANNABIS), POSSESS OF CONTROL DRUGS (EX CANNABIS)
South Yorkshire Police consider investigation outcomes with the utmost importance to understand the effectiveness of our activity in relation to victim wishes and criminal justice delivery. Certain data fields within the forces crime reporting system are not mandatory, therefore we do not recommend the use of suspect level outcome to be the most effective way of measuring crime outcomes. Internal testing as shown that using the outcome of the investigation to be the most accurate way of reporting and presenting this data. This aligns to the data that is reported to the Home Office for purposes of national comparison.
The data you are requesting is not recorded in an easily retrievable format and to provide the level of data you require would require a manual review of all the
offences. At a conservative 2 mins per incident this process would take over 251 hrs.
In essence, we would have to review and manually check all relevant incidents to extract the level of detail of the cases that met the criteria of your request; this process would take much longer than 18 hours’ work.
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.
Guidance from the Information Commissioner to public authorities is that where one part of a request is reasonably estimated to exceed the appropriate limit then the authority is not obliged to consider or comply with the remainder of the request up to the point at which the appropriate limit has been reached. Please note point 30 of the below link:
Please note, every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that data has been extracted from data sources used by this force for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording systems and information assets.
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/data for any requests may have limitations, and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
Police forces do not use generic systems or identical procedures for capturing the data. For these reasons this response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with responses you may receive from other police forces.