FOI 0608-20024/25- Arrests made at racecourses

Request:

Q1. How many arrests occurred between 21/08/24 and 24/08/24 in York?

Q2. Do you collect data for arrests made at York Racecourse or Ripon Racecourse? If so, can you share the past 5 years' arrest figures?

Q3. How many police officers were deployed to York Racecourse for the Ebor Festival this year (21/08/24 - 24/08/24)?

Q4. How much money does providing these police officers cost the force?

Q5. How many incidents of drug confiscations occurred at York racecourse in the past five years?

Response: 

Extent of Searches to Locate Information

Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police to locate relevant information. 

Decision

I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt.

Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

In relation to Q4, due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. Our usual method of searching for information on our finance system consists of a computerised report which searches for data held under particular cost codes. Unfortunately, due to the nature of your request North Yorkshire Police do not track the costs of policing in such a way to enable us the answer the question.

There is no cost to NYP in relation to any officers within the racecourses, as these are paid by the racecourse based upon an agreement. For any officers outside of this, the costs of such officers are not recorded in such a way that will enable us to retrieve the information as generally this cost would be absorbed by the normal day to day policing budgets. In order to ascertain the relevant information, we would be required to manually review all purchases made to determine which, if any are relevant to your request. This manual review would take a considerable amount of time consequently exceeding the appropriate time/ cost limit stated under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act (2000) regulations.

Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.

Pursuant to Section 16 of the Act I am required to offer you advice and assistance with regarding to refining your request to within the ‘appropriate limit’ (time/cost limit). However, we may be able to provide some information for part 1, 2, 3 and 5 if you resubmit and omit part 4.  If you wish to discuss this please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data.  It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.