The Trickling Responses Become a Pattern

Today was the day the tracker changed character.

Until now, the responses had been varied: clarification requests, website links, a cost refusal from the Met, and Lancashire’s first appearance of Section 31.

Then several forces arrived at almost the same destination at once.

Staffordshire Police told us Section 31 — Law Enforcement — was engaged and extended its deadline while carrying out a public-interest test.

City of London Police said our request was being considered under Section 31 and moved its substantive response to 19 October.

Kent Police said it was considering whether Section 31 might be engaged and needed additional time to determine where the public interest lay.

Leicestershire Police also identified Section 31 and extended its response into October.

Essex Police said Section 31 was engaged.

Gwent Police confirmed that it held some or all of the requested information, but said that information might be exempt under Section 31(1) while it considered the public interest.

South Yorkshire Police applied its own Section 31 public-interest extension.

And Northumbria Police told us it was still researching the information held and considering whether exemptions might apply, “in particular Section 31 — Law Enforcement”.

One Section 31 notice could be an individual response to an individual request. Several arriving together demanded closer attention.

Again, these were not final refusals. We did not know what any of these forces would eventually disclose. There may be perfectly legitimate law-enforcement concerns within particular documents, and we remained open to that possibility.

But many of the notices were extremely broad. They often did not identify which of our six questions caused the concern, which subsection of Section 31 was relevant, or what sort of prejudice disclosure was thought capable of causing.

So we started asking.

The follow-up questions were deliberately short: Which subsection? Which part of the request? What law-enforcement interest might be prejudiced? And, at a high level, how could disclosure cause that prejudice?

We were not asking forces to complete their public-interest tests immediately. We were trying to understand the boundaries of the concern they had already raised.

By the end of the day, the tracker was becoming less about simply recording answers and increasingly about recording how authorities justified not yet giving them.

We had started with a straightforward proposition: Show us the records demonstrating that the safeguards work.

On 18 September, the question beginning to emerge alongside it was: Why does asking for that evidence so often lead us to Section 31?

We did not yet have the answer. But we now knew it was a question worth pursuing.