Dear Northampton Borough Council

I request information under the recognised time constraints imposed by the Freedom Of Information Act.

As way of overview, you were recently an unwitting victim of a PINAC ‘audit’, which can be witnessed here as the incident was recorded to video and uploaded to YouTube in the following two parts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXNL9REG...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZNiUCAs...

These so-called ‘audits’, are where someone targets specific locations such as police stations, military bases, or local authority buildings under the pretext of being an innocent member of the public. However, their actual intention is to deliberately incite confrontation, film it, then upload the resulting footage to various globally accessible platforms to gain popularity amongst their followers.

Such behaviour originated in America and has developed into a form of cult and there are now a great many such active 'auditors' here in the UK.

By simply looking at an uploader’s internet video content, you can easily and clearly see the 'auditor' in question is currently targeting local authority buildings. Once challenged, they will play the victim, but engineer each scenario to make their targets appear as inept as possible, then encouraging others to bombard their targets with phone calls, designed solely to ridicule.

So, be very clear, such people are not just innocent members of the public, this is all a smokescreen, a facade and they are there exclusively to provoke, harass in a carefully orchestrated but camouflaged manner. They have absolutely no interest, photographic or otherwise, in the locations they visit, instead an unmistakably defined agenda of nothing but ill-intent all centred around increasing YouTube hits.

Such activity is pre-meditated anti-social behaviour, although the target/recipient is simply unaware of what is taking place at the time.

Therefore, questions:

Q1). Please confirm if there is any signage deployed that identifies if filming/ taking photographs is permitted in the building that appears in the above clips?

Q2). If not, why not?

Q3). I would be most unhappy if I had paid for a private meeting venue only to be filmed inside the building and my face uploaded to the internet, yet your staff simply allowed filming to continue. So what instructions have your security staff been given when dealing with someone who refuses to stop filming/taking photographs in areas where such is prohibited? If this takes the form of a training document, please provide a copy.

Q4). Is the prohibition of filming/taking photographs in certain areas based upon legislation or an internal policy?

Q5). Please either cite the legislation, or policy. Provide a copy of the policy if it exists.

Q6). In light of this incident, what changes do you plan to make to remove any doubt as to where filming/photography is permitted?

Q7). Following this information request, would you consider informing every council facility within your remit of the possibility that they may be visited by such 'auditors'?

Q8). Continually returning to the same location with the intention of using behaviour designed to harass can constitute a public order offence. How many times have police been called to this location by yourselves for such instances?

Q9). How many times has an arrest by police been made as detailed in Q8?

Yours faithfully,

Andrew Whitehead