FOI 0884-2024/25 & 0885-2024/25- Wrongful arrests at protests

Request:

Q1. Between 1 January 2022 and 1 January 2025, how many times has your force made a wrongful arrest, when “protest” was recorded as part of the arrest, or the arrest was recorded as taking place at a “protest.”

Please provide data by calendar year.

Q2. For each wrongful arrest when “protest” was recorded as part of the arrest, or the arrest was recorded as taking place at a “protest”, please can you provide the offence under which the arrest was made, e.g. the offence of locking on; assaulting an emergency worker.

Q3. Between 1 January 2022 and 1 January 2025, how much compensation has your force paid out to victims of wrongful arrest, when “protest” was recorded as part of the arrest, or the arrest was recorded as taking place at a “protest.”

Please provide data by calendar year.

Q4. In the time period 28/06/2022 up to 01/01/2025, on how many occasions has your force used the powers allowed for in Section 75 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022: Offences under sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act 1986?

Sections 12 and 14 of the 1986 Act (as amended by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022) allow the police to impose any type of condition on a public procession or public assembly necessary to prevent: significant impact on persons or serious disruption to the activities of an organisation by noise; serious disorder; serious damage to property; serious disruption to the life of the community; or if the purpose of the persons organising the protest is the intimidation of others with a view to compelling them not to do an act they have a right to do, or to do an act they have a right not to do.

Q5. In the time period 28/06/2022 up to 01/01/2025, how many arrests has your force made under Section 78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022: the offence of intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance

Q6. In the time period 28/06/2022 up to 01/01/2025, on how many occasions has your force used the powers allowed for in Section 79 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022: imposing conditions on one-person protests?

Q7. In the time period 12/05/2022 up to 01/01/2025, how many arrests has your force made under Section 80 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022: wilful obstruction of a highway?

Response: 

Extent and Result of Searches to Locate Information

To locate the information relevant to your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by North Yorkshire Police.  

Decision

Under Section 5 of the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, requests can be aggregated where (a) the two or more requests by one person relate, to any extent, to the same or similar information, and (b) those requests received by the public authority within any period of sixty consecutive working days.

As such, your requests made on 03 January 2025 – 0884.2024-25 and 0885.2024-25 have been aggregated into one response.

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.

Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer ran report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is required to retrieve that information.

In order to retrieve the requested information, it would be necessary to manually review all files that related to ‘false imprisonment’ for the timeframe stated to establish if it related to a wrongful arrest at a protest and if any compensation was made in relation to that, which would exceed the time limit allowed under the Act. 

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 informations for parts 4, 5, 6 and 7 if you resubmit and omit parts 1, 2 and 3.  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.