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Request:
Q1a. How many police officers are in your force?
b)How many of these officers are dedicated to dealing with domestic abuse / are domestic abuse specialists? What is the name of the role/roles if there is one?
c) (N.B., police officers dedicated to dealing with domestic abuse will be called domestic abuse specialists in the following questions - please still provide answers if they have a different official title)
d) What is the gender makeup of your domestic abuse specialists, if you have them?
e) Do you have a specialist domestic abuse team in the force? If so, what is the name of the team? And who do they report to?
f) If you have domestic abuse specialists, how does someone become a domestic abuse specialist in your force? Ie. do they put themself forward, or are they selected by an individual from the force. Who makes the decision for this promotion?
Q2. Please describe in detail how your force handles domestic abuse cases from the initial 999 call to the case being passed on to the CPS.
a) What are the steps involved?
b) What is the average time for a victim to have their case passed on to the CPS?
For questions 1a, 1b and 1c, please provide data for each quarter of the last 5 years, if you have this on record. If you do not, please give data for as many of the five years as you have.
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.
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 domestic violence reports, to establish if the case was referred to the CPS and if so, the time it took to be referred so that an average time could be calculated, which would mean reading through hundreds of reports, 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 information for part 1a-1e, part 2 and part 2a if you resubmit and omit part 2b. 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.