FOI Armed Unit Response Times (126-2024/25)

Request

Q1. For 12 months to the end of April 2024, please outline your force's average response time for a firearms unit / armed response unit, where an emergency call demands an armed police response.
- Please break this data / timings down by each post code area your force serves, eg. SW1, L27, EH11 .
Q2. Additionally, please provide this information for 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23.
Q3. What are your force's target times for armed police responses to these post code locations?
Q4. In the year to April 2024, how many incidents required an armed police response from your force?
Q5. Additionally, please provide this information for 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23

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. To retrieve this data would require reviewing thousands of incidents to firstly find the ones that involved firearms/armed response unit and then to manually review the locations of the incidents by postcode. This manual review 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, 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.

Although S12 exempt a further response to your request, I have decided to provide the following information utside of the act.

Q3 No Information Held – we do not record response times specifically for armed police response.

Q4 & Q5. Government data tables containing firearm statistics by force can be found on the following link.

Police use of firearms statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

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.