Data on Deployment of Incapacitant Spray or Tasers – 2022 to 2025

Publication Number: 1584

FOI Number: 21939

Information Request – which has been numbered to assist with the disclosure

1. The total number of deployments of incapacitant spray/tasers from January 2022 to as recently as possible in 2025
2. A breakdown of the circumstances of these deployments.
3. A breakdown of the type of incapacitant spray/taser that was deployed.
4. Further clarification: when I refer to "deployment", this includes a taser being drawn from its holster without being fired.
5. For the provision of the total number of authorisations for the deployment of attenuating energy projectiles/armed response units from January 2022 to as recently as possible in 2025
6. A breakdown of the reasons for why the authorisation was given in each instance.

FOI Duty   

First Duty – Essex Police may hold some information relating to your request  

Second Duty – See below  

Fact - It is not possible to extract and verify all the data in your request  

Exemption - Section 12(1)  

Refusal - Section 17(5) of FOIA  

Reasoning – Essex Police are unable to provide a comprehensive data report to meet this request as the data is not available in a readily extractable format, nor is it held on a central log. 

With regard to Questions 2 and 6, Essex Police is unable to provide a specific breakdown of the circumstances of deployments of incapacitant spray/tasers or a breakdown of the reasons for why the authorisation was given for each deployment between 2022 and 2025 as this is not readily extractable information from our Use Of Force recording system. To attempt to answer these questions would require manually reviewing all incapacitant spray / taser deployments recorded in the desired time period to ascertain the specific circumstances of the deployment and the specific reason why the authorisation was given and then extracting any relevant information found and collating it into a bespoke report.

To establish if information is held would, therefore, exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would additionally qualify as the creation of data as the results cannot be processed by means of purely sorting or filtering data sources or running a database query tool. There is no requirement under the act to create data purely to answer FOI requests. 

When refusing a request on cost (Section 12(1)/12(2)), outside of the act and in effort to assist we can provide the following 

Essex Police can however provide the following information:

Caveat: The data is correct as at 24 June 2025

To address Questions 1 and 3, we can provide the following data for the use of incapacitant spray or tasers between January 2022 and May 2025:

Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from a number of sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.