FOI Amount of people arrested with the occupation of journalist/ reporter/ correspondent/ columnist/ writer/ blogger 2020-2022 (0743-2022/23)

Request

I'm writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act (2000) to ask that you please disclose to me the amount of people arrested by your constabulary whose occupation was listed as journalist, reporter, correspondent, columnist, writer, or blogger - or however this is logged within your organisation at time of arrest - during any policing of protest action that your officers attended within the last three years 2020, 2021, 2022.

I do not need the names of those arrested, or their organisations, but I would like to include anyone taken into custody or who had equipment seized from them during these protests, be they covid, climate, women's rights, anti-military, far left/right, black lives matter or any other major relevant protest across this timeframe. This would include people who were ultimately released without charge subsequent to being arrested - a famous recent example would be Hertfordshire police arresting a journalist from LBC for covering the Just Stop Oil protests.

I'd also like to know the percentage of these instances in which further action either was or was not taken if possible.

 

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 usually required to retrieve that information. A persons occupation is not mandatorily recorded as it is not always relevant to the offence being investigated. In addition, one person may have more than one occupation recorded on police systems, and it is only possible to establish if a person was a journalist, reporter, correspondent, columnist, writer, or blogger at the time that an offence was committed by conducting a manual read of each crime/incident record. This would involve reading through several reports which would exceed the time limit 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, due to the information provided above I am unable to suggest how you may refine your request and still receive the information within the cost threshold.  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.