Schools Reporting TikTok Abuse
Keywords
Schools, Reporting, TikTok, Abuse, Accounts, Videos, Targeting, Staff, Received, Breakdown, Months, Reports, Resulted, Further, Action.
Publication Number
PUB 1321
FOI Reference Number
16445
Request Title
Schools Reporting TikTok Abuse
Date Range
September to November 2021
Information Requested
How many reports of fake TikTok accounts and videos targeting school staff have been received by the Essex force?
Please could you break down the number of reports for the following months:
September 2021
October 2021
November 2021
Please state how many of these reports have resulted in further action and what this action was.
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 16445 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 as there is a known system issue regarding the current occupation of individuals. Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not primarily for the production of statistical information for FOI responses. Essex Police are unable to provide crime data by occupation due to system constraints. Occupations are not currently returned in an accurate format and in addition the occupation at the time of the crime cannot be identified if the occupation has changed. Also, the Occupation Field is not always completed as this is not a Mandatory Field. This request would entail manually extracting the requested data and reviewing each record one by one to establish the occupation at that point in time if held. 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.
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 Modus Operandi (MO) Field for ‘TikTok’ could be undertaken if required where the Location Type is School, College or Academy. Arrest and outcome data can then be provided. However, please note that 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. In addition, the Location Type within our Crime system is also not reliably used.
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.