FOI 0749-2024/25- Social media arrests

Request:

Q1) How many people have been arrested for posts on social media? [Helpful background here: https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/har/harassment-on-social-media/ social media includes things like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram]

Q2) How many people have been charged over social media posts?

Q3) How many people have been convicted over social media posts?

Please could it be broken down into the following years? [I understand records might not go back as far as requested or in the format requested but please provide detail as close as possible to the format requested]

• 2014 - 2024

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 offences recorded over the timeframe requested, to establish if social media was an element within the offence. A further manual review would be needed to establish if any charges were brought and convictions obtained, this would mean reading through thousands 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 some information if you provide us with a crime type you wish for us to search on or we may be able to provide you with the number of incidents within a specified time frame where key words are recorded in the MO Summary field, for example “social media”. Similarly, further key words in relation to social media platforms may need searching upon such as “Facebook” or “Instagram’’. You would be required to provide a list of Key Words for us to search upon. However the accuracy of these results rely on an Officer recording the specific words in the field and it is likely that further manual reads would be required in order to ensure the results fit to your request (i.e. person working at the time of the incident). Due to the above I do not feel that results would be reliable. Please do not hesitate to contact me further to discuss or submit a new request.  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.