REQUEST

RESPONSE

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

1) Can you confirm or deny that the 999control room acts merely as a customer service call centre and

2) is manned by civilians or CSO's and not actual police officers.

3) If it is manned by a combination of Civilians, CSO's and actual police officers please provide the total number of staff and ratio of civilians and CSO's to actual police officers.

1) Merseyside Police does not refer to its emergency (999) call handling facilities as customer service call centres.

2) All 999 call-handlers are Police Support Staff (not CSOs or police Officers) that are specifically trained for the role of call-handler.

3) Not applicable.

Upon making a emergency (999) telephone call, in the first instance, the caller will be directed to an operator (not employed by the police) who identifies which service is required. If the police are required, callers will then be transferred to Merseyside Police to an emergency (999) call handler.

4) Can you also provide figures for the number of crimes in total that are actually referred on to a police station for actual police officer attention and exclusive of CSO attention.

(This question was clarified by the applicant to refer to the calendar year 2008)

4) Exempt - Section 12

The cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the `appropriate level' as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004, which equates to 18 hours. It is estimated it would cost in excess of £450 to comply with your request.

Crimes as such are not referred to a police station for attention. Incident logs from calls received are forwarded to a dispatch centre for the deployment of police resources. To provide an accurate number of crimes would involve the interrogation of every single incident log for the year 2008, to determine if it was recorded as a crime. There are 131,843 incident logs relating to this year, each would have to be manually viewed and cross-referenced with another recording system to determine whether a crime was committed. This would clearly exceed the time and cost limits set by the Act.

5) If the cost is not prohibitive can you further break down that figure into a fully comprehensive list of definitive crimes and the times applicable to attending the complaints address in order of deemed priority.

5) Exempt - Section 12 (as above)