Police Force breaking into the wrong home address
Request
1. How many times in the last 5 calendar years has your Police Force broken
into the wrong home address by mistake searching for evidence?
2. How many times did your Police Force:
a) Use breaking in as a first resort
b) Consider and use less intrusive methods of pursuing evidence?
3. What is the highest, lowest and average compensation or restitution paid?
Response
Section 12(1) – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
I approached the four district teams (Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster & Barnsley) within South Yorkshire regarding your request. In relation to Rotherham, it would require someone manually trawling through all compensation claims to see if the wrong address was searched. Additionally, Legal Services would need to be consulted to carry out the same manual search. This process would also be required at all other districts to respond as a Force. Therefore, 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. The total time to carry this exercise out over a period of five years would far exceed the 18 hours timeframe.
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.