18 February 2019
Our Reference: IR-01-18-16744
Mark Hanna
Email:
[FYI request #9074 email]
Dear Mr Hanna
Thank you for your email of 17 January 2018 regarding the recent response you received
to your OIA request (20 December 2018, IR-01-18-16744). My answers to your questions
are outlined below.
Could you please clarify for me the grounds under which my request would be refused if I
do not agree to pay the fee?
Should you not agree to pay for the data requested in your most recent OIA, your request
will be refused pursuant to section 18(f) of the Official Information Act 1982 as the
information you requested cannot be made available without substantial collation or
research. You have the right, under section 28(3) of the Act to ask the Ombudsman to
review this decision.
Please provide me with a breakdown of the estimated costs for releasing the information I
have requested?
It is important to note that the datasets for your previous request took 10-12 hours to
complete, not one hour or less as you appear to believe. This is based on the time (not
costs) it took our analysts to extract and collate, partially recode, identify and remove
duplicate information, apply necessary redactions and, to complete a reasonably required
peer review in order to ensure the previous tasks were completed correctly.
Police do have robust recording processes in place. However, while there are guidelines
in place, some officers may provide information in a non-standard way which must then be
standardised in order to be analysed as a whole, while also remaining consistent and
comparable against data from previous periods. Therefore this needs to be worked through
to ensure data is presented in a meaningful way. This process must occur each time new
data is extracted. As what you have requested is the raw data, which is the entirety of the
extractable data for the requested period, this process must be completed on a large
number of records and is time consuming.
Police provided you with the information for your first request (24 October 2017,
16/7758/11) as we considered this to be a one-off request and wanted to be helpful. With
your second request (28 August 2018, IR-01-18-5190), it became apparent that you may
Police National Headquarters 180 Molesworth Street. PO Box 3017, Wellington 6140, New Zealand.
Telephone: 04 474 9499. Fax: 04 498 7400. www.police.govt.nz
be requesting this information on a regular basis and therefore, after consultation within
Police, it was used as an exercise to fully understand the time and resource requirement.
As we now have a greater understanding of how time consuming it is to provide this
information, we have decided to implement a charge for your request based in the Ministry
of Justice guidelines
(Justice Ministry OIAS charging guidelines).
As advised in our previous letter to you, should you decide to refine your request, which
will reduce the dataset to more specific information, such as TASER or firearms, we can
consider providing this information based on the requests individual merits.
New Zealand Police produce TOR data in the form of a calendar year annual Use of Force
report (using this dataset) which is made publically available. This may meet your needs
without you having to analyse the data yourself. The annual report covering 2018 will likely
be published mid-2019.
Yours sincerely
Acting Superintendent Andrew Sissons
National Manager: Response and Operations
