Protests and Threatening Communications Relating to COVID-19 Vaccines at Schools
Keywords
Protests, Threatening, Communications, COVID-19, Vaccines, Schools, Number, Reports, Inside, Outside, Monthly, Breakdown, Academic, Year, Nature, Incident, Attended, Actions, Arrests, Cautions, Contacted, Offered.
Publication Number
PUB 1318
FOI Reference Number
16436
Request Title
Protests and Threatening Communications Relating to COVID-19 Vaccines at Schools
Date Range
September 2020 to November 2021
Information Requested
1. The number of reports that schools in the area have made to the police about anti-vaccination protests inside or just outside the school between September 2020-November 2021.
2. Ideally I would like a monthly breakdown of the information for the last academic year (Sept 2020 - August 2021) as well as the current academic year (Sept 2021 - November 2021).
3. The nature of each incident, whether it was inside or outside the school, and whether police attended the incident.
4. What action was taken (for example how many arrests or cautions) as a result of the reports. If action was taken, please can you provide a breakdown of what the action related to.
5. Please can you also set out the number of times that schools have contacted police over threatening communications relating to Covid-19 vaccines being offered at their school in this period - and what action (if any) was taken.
Disclosure with Exemptions
Full Refusal with Section 12 and Section 17 Exemptions
Information Correct as at
N/A
Date of Disclosure
13 December 2021
Related Documents/Links
N/A
FOI 16436 Response
Having completed enquiries within Essex Police in respect of Section 1(1)(a), Essex Police does hold information relating to your request, however, the obligation of Section 1(1)(b) cannot be met as Essex Police does not hold all the information requested in a format that allows it to be retrieved within the time and cost limits of FOI.
When responding to a request for information under the terms of the FOIA, a public authority is not obliged to provide information if the authority estimates that the cost of the retrieval of the information requested would be in excess of £450 (equivalent to 18 hours work). The costs criteria relates to a request in its entirety, which means that if we cannot retrieve all of the information requested within the costs limit, we are not obliged to retrieve any of the information requested.
Section 12(1) of the FOIA states that a public authority is not obliged to:
“…comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.”
The following explanation outlines the difficulty Essex Police has in answering your request:
Essex Police are unable to accurately extract the level of detail in relation to your request for the requested period from our current systems. Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not primarily for the production of statistical information for FOI responses. We do not have a Protest Flag or Indictor on the Custody system. This request would entail extracting all arrests within the requested time frame and then reviewing each file one by one to establish if this terminology is included within the file. To establish if information is held would, therefore, exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would 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.
Consequently, and to this extent, Essex Police are exempt from the duty to provide information you have requested under the provisions of Section 12(1) of the FOIA. Therefore, and in accordance with Section 17(1) of the FOIA, this communication must act as a refusal notice to provide all of the information that could be interpreted as being captured by this part of your request.
Having said that and in an effort to assist, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the FOIA, Essex Police can confirm the following:
We could extract arrests for “Breach of the Peace – Causing”, however, this could relate to anything.
Section 16(1) of the FOIA provides that a public authority is required to provide advice and assistance, Essex Police can confirm that a keyword search of the Free Text Arrest Circumstances Field could be undertaken for particular words if required. However, any keyword search may not be entirely accurate and any results would not necessarily answer your submission, and, therefore, could be highly inaccurate and misleading.
For a keyword search to be undertaken, you would need to provide a list of keywords you would like searched.
The intention of Section 16 is to provide assistance in resubmitting a valid request. Please note that any advice and assistance under Section 16 regarding resubmission of a request does not indicate that resubmission will provide a full disclosure, each submission will be assessed and if a disclosure is deemed harmful, then the appropriate exemptions will apply.