The response to this request was due over a week ago now. By having failed to respond within the legislated timeframe, NZ Police have broken the law. I recommend you complain to the Ombudsman about this unlawful delay.

If it helps, I have a template I use when complaining to the Ombudsman about unlawfully overdue responses to OIA requests: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ad2Z...

I hope you'll lay a complaint about this unlawful delay. Police behave this way to many requesters, but because they are exempt from the jurisdiction of the Ombudsmen Act the Ombudsman is unable to investigate this as a pattern of unlawful behaviour.

Receiving individual complaints about unlawful delays like this one are the only way the Ombudsman is able to determine the scope of the problem, and the only way they can take any action against Police. But because of how the OIA is set up, only the requester has standing to complain about a response (or lack or a response) to an OIA request.

I see Police has withheld a lot of information under section 6(c) of the Official Information Act, asserting that releasing it would be likely to prejudice the maintenance of the law.

In the past, Police has made very questionable decisions to withhold information from Police Manual chapters for this reason. Decisions that it later disagreed with. For example, when releasing the "Burglary and allied offences" chapter, Police at one point withheld information like this under s6(c):

"To ensure no fingerprints are missed, try to find... surfaces that may have been touched"

"Secure any evidence such as tools and instruments used to force entry"

Police later released that document in full to a different requester.

It's possible that Police have made similarly unjustified decisions to withhold information under s6(c) in response to this request. There is no way to know without seeing the information itself.

I recommend you lay a complaint with the Ombudsman regarding Police's decision to withhold some information from these documents.

The Ombudsman's guideline on section 6 refusals is clear that:

"It is not sufficient to simply assert that disclosure of the information will have a prejudicial effect. The public sector agency must be able to identify, with sufficient particularity, the nature of the prejudicial effect and explain how such prejudice will occur in order to meet the tests for withholding in section 6."

In investigating a complaint, the Ombudsman will likely require Police to explain the reason behind their decisions, in order to convince the Ombudsman that the decisions were justified. While considering this, the Ombudsman would also be able to review the information that has been withheld.