01/FOI/26/007771/A – Arrests recorded in connection with football matches or football related events

Request:

For the period 1 January 2018 to 1 June 2026:

1. The total number of arrests recorded by your force in connection with football matches or football-related events.

1a. Of these, how many involved individuals were aged under 18 at the time of arrest.

1b. Where available, please provide an annual (calendar year) breakdown of the under-18 arrests.

1c. If the type of offence is included in your data (e.g. public order, violence, possession of pyrotechnics), please also include this information.

For the purposes of this request, 'football-related' refers to arrests recorded by the force as connected to a football match, football event, football policing operation, football banning order matter, or otherwise classified as football-related within police records. 

Response:

It has been advised that it is not possible to retrieve any part of your request within the ‘appropriate limit’ (18 – hours). This is because the information that you are requesting is not stored in a way which permits easy retrieval.

It would require a manual review of 714,346 occurrences. At 15 minutes per case, this would take approximately 178,586 hours. We also do not have knowledge of every football match/event held in the force area. Therefore Section 12 of the FOI Act applies. 

Please also note it is not possible to search” football” in the MO’s, as not all MO’s would contain the information required or could contain references such as “they kicked a football at my window”.

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

s1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ (18 – hours).

Activities that may be counted within our time estimations are:

• Determining if the information is held;
• Locating the information, or a document containing it;
• Retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and
• Extracting the information from a document containing it.

The following have not been included within our calculations:

• The time spent identifying information to be exempted
• The time dedicated to the process of redaction.

Please take this as a refusal notice in accordance with section 17(5) of the Act which states; A public authority which, in relation to any request for information, is relying on a claim that section 12 or 14 applies must, within the time for complying with section 1(1), give the applicant a notice stating that fact.

Ordinarily under our section 16 duty to provide advice and assistance, we would advise you how to refine your request to a more manageable level. However, due to the difficulties outlined above, I cannot see how this can be achieved in this case.

Please note that police forces in the United Kingdom are routinely required to provide information and statistics to government bodies and the recording criteria is set nationally. However, the systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. It should be noted that for these reasons this force’s response to your questions should not be used for the comparison purposes with any other response you may receive.