Birmingham airport arrests (FOI ref: 349A/24)
REQUEST
1) How many arrests have been made at Birmingham Airport in the past three years? (Between 2021-2023. Up to and including any data held for 2024). Can this be broken down by year?
1.a) What are the nature of these arrests? (For example, GBH with intent, racially aggravated assault, assault on an officer) - How many arrests were made for each offence per year?
2) How many arrests took place on planes for alcohol-related crimes in the past three years? (Between 2021-2023. Up to and including any data held for 2024). Can this be broken down by year?
2.a) What was the nature of these arrests? (For example, drunk in an aircraft, drunk in charge of a child) - How many arrests were made for each offence per year?
RESPONSE
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. With regard to question 1a, reason for arrests has not been recorded for the full time period requested. Therefore, in order to try and identify this information we would need to conduct an extensive interrogation and cross referencing of other Force systems to match up the data. However, due to the volume of data recorded during this time period, these searches would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
However, under Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide the remainder of the requested information as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please find this information attached (349A_24_Attachment.pdf).
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.
Attachment