Social media companies providing assistance when requested by law enforcement 2019-24

Request

Please provide the following information for the period 2019 to 2024 for South Yorkshire Police. If possible please present the information in six month sections. So in total this would be

• Jan-Jun 2019
• Jul-Dec 2019
• Jan-Jun 2020
• Jul-Dec 2020
• Jan-Jun 2021
• Jul-Dec 2021
• Jan-Jun 2022
• Jul-Dec 2022
• Jan-Jun 2023
• Jul-Dec 2023
• Jan-Jun 2024

1. The total number of investigations began by South Yorkshire Police within those periods
2. The total number of investigations by South Yorkshire Police within those periods, in which information to support prosecution, other than that which is already in the public domain, was requested from the company Meta, or any of its subsidiaries or trading names.
3. The total number of investigations by South Yorkshire Police within those periods, in which any of the information requested in point 3 was subsequently provided by Meta.
4. The total number of requests by South Yorkshire Police, within those
periods, made to Meta for any information other than that in the public domain.
5. Of the requests in point 4, how many were successful for each period?

Response

Section 12(1) – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit

I approached the administrator for South Yorkshire Police’s Criminal Justice
Department. An initial search of their system using ‘Meta’, ‘Facebook’ and
‘Instagram’ as key words in the investigation summary fields provided over
10,000 records. 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 333 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:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/freedom-of-information-and-environmentalinformation-regulations/section-12-requests-where-the-cost-of-compliance-exceedsthe-appropriate-limit/

Section 16 - Duty to Provide advice and Assistance

Under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, my duty to provide advice and assistance to anyone making a request for information.

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 or available before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded.

I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fee’s
regulations for the remainder of your request neither does it bind South Yorkshire Police to any commitment that it will release information in such a manner in the future.

I approached our Performance Review Unit for assistance with your request. An
analyst within this unit has conducted a search of our Crime Management System - Connect which records complaints or allegations of those matters, which the Home Office specify should be recorded as 'crimes'. All our systems are designed and used first and foremost for Policing Purposes and have limited search capability. They provided me with following explanation regarding their search criteria and below table:

1. Criteria Used - Incident Created Date is between 01/01/2019 and 30/06/2024, SYP & crime only filter

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.