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Drone reports in 2017

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Dear Thames Valley Police,

I represent a national directory of commercial drone operators. I am trying to give some clarity to our members on media reports.

It has been reported in the media following an FOI request from a Dr Alan McKenna, that there was a nationwide increase in drone related 101/999 reports in 2017, up 32% on 2016.
Amongst these calls there will be calls from legal drone operators to notify the police of the fact they're operating in an area of risk, say a city centre for example or within a school. There will be calls from people who have lost a drone or had one stolen by someone else. Therefore it's unlikely all the calls related to crimes that were actually being committed using a drone. I seek to clarify this.
Can you answer any of the following:

1. Can you breakdown the categories of the all calls relating to drones? I.e. how many calls were from legal operators, how many were reports of noise nuisance and so on?

2. Of the calls made to the police on the subject of drones, how many calls actually turned out to be crimes being committed? How many were attended by officers and how many led to an arrest?

3. In total, how many calls were made to your force through 101/999 in 2017 on all subject matters?

Yours faithfully,

Lee Ballard

Public Access, Thames Valley Police

Automatic reply from the Thames Valley Police, Public Access Office and the Joint Information Management Unit.

Thank you for your email. We are currently experiencing a high volume of enquiries and requests for information, and we may not be able to respond as quickly as we would like. We will respond as soon as possible, however, you may wish to visit our website, https://www.thamesvalley.police.uk/conta.... Please see below for further assistance and direction.

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Our address and that of other teams/offices indicated above, is;

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Thames Valley Police Headquarters
Oxford Road
KIDLINGTON
OX5 2NX

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Public Access, Thames Valley Police

1 Attachment

Dear requester

Please find attached the response from Thames Valley Police to your request for recorded information.

Regards

Darren Humphries  | Public Access Officer
Joint Information Management Unit | Hampshire Constabulary & Thames Valley Police
Telephone 101 or +44(0)1865 542051 | Address Thames Valley Police Headquarters, Oxford Road, Kidlington, Oxfordshire, OX5 2NX

Information Management Helpdesk:
Hampshire        [email address] / 02380 479580 (internal 4631754)
Thames Valley   [email address] / 01865 542051 (internal 300 6329)

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Dear Thames Valley Police,

It's a shame that you're system doesn't have a basic keyword search option like many other forces I've been dealing with. Can you check with your IT department please that keyword searching is not available.

Yours faithfully,

Lee Ballard

Peter Bowyer left an annotation ()

The way your question was worded it couldn't be answered with a keyword search, it would need manual inspection of each subsequent result. You could try asking for the number of logs that contain the word 'drone'.

Public Access, Thames Valley Police

Mr Ballard

Our incident recording system does have fields that can be searched using keywords. However, such searches are, by their very nature, inaccurate. For example, the term 'drone' will appear in many drug-related incidents as part of 'methedrone/mephedrone', or any burglary or theft where a 'drone' was listed amongst the stolen items, or where anyone 'droned on' or any incident where a 'drone' is mentioned quite incidentally such as 'he insulted my drone and then hit me' etc.

Previous requests of this type have shown that to carry out such a keyword search and then read through all the returned data to determine if it is, in fact, to do with unmanned aerial vehicles and then to extract the other information requested, which may involve cross-referencing between the incident recording system and the crime recording system, results in a refusal of the request for exceeding 18 hours work, as set by Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act.

However, if you wish to have a keyword search done of searchable fields within the incident recording system solely for the number of occasions where these contain a certain keyword, please supply us with the keyword(s) you are interested in.

Your request will be placed on hold as invalid until you supply the search terms you wish to use.

Yours sincerely

Darren Humphries  | Public Access Officer
Joint Information Management Unit | Hampshire Constabulary & Thames Valley Police
Telephone 101 or +44(0)1865 542051 | Address Thames Valley Police Headquarters, Oxford Road, Kidlington, Oxfordshire, OX5 2NX

Information Management Helpdesk:
Hampshire        [email address] / 02380 479580 (internal 4631754)
Thames Valley   [email address] / 01865 542051 (internal 300 6329)

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We don't know whether the most recent response to this request contains information or not – if you are Lee Ballard please sign in and let everyone know.