FOI 10654-25 Suicide incidents and training
Request to Northamptonshire Police:
1. How many mental health incidents did your service respond to in these years? Please also indicate what percentage of total incidents were mental health incidents if possible:
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- 2020
- 2021
- 2022
- 2023
- 2024
2.How many suicide attempts and self-inflicted incidents did your service respond to in these years? Please also indicate what percentage of total incidents were suicide attempts and self-inflicted incidents if possible:
-
- 2020
- 2021
- 2022
- 2023
- 2024
3. Please briefly outline any training your staff receive on the below areas, including what the training covers and the named training provider if externally delivered:
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- Suicide prevention
- Suicide postvention
4. If there is suicide prevention training in place, is it currently mandatory for all staff? If the training is not mandatory, please indicate which staff it is offered to.
5. If there is suicide prevention training in place, please indicate how many staff members received training in 2024 in:
-
- Number of total staff who received training
- Percentage of total staff who received training
Response:
Northamptonshire Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the production of statistical information for Freedom Of Information responses.
Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Northamptonshire Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which:
- states that fact,
- specifies the exemption in question and
- states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption
The exemption applicable to the information requested is:
Section 12(1) – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
The information you are requesting regarding ‘suicide attempts and self-inflicted incidents’ is not held by Northamptonshire Police in any reasonably retrievable form. The only means of establishing information of the nature you are requesting would be by way of manual examination of each record. We searched all incident descriptions for the keywords ‘Attempt/ed Suicide’, ‘Suicide’, ‘Self Inflict/ed’ and ‘Self harm/ed’ but this will include people feeling suicidal, or being concerned about someone who is, or planning to inflict self harm. As with any keyword search, the search will only return exact matches within the Incident Description. This does not account for differences in terminology and/or spelling used. Keyword searches are problematic and in no way provide accurate results or figures. If the selected key words have not been mentioned the data will not be returned. Vice versa, if the key words have been mentioned in an unrelated context irrelevant data will be collected.
Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer ran report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is usually required to retrieve that information.
It is my assessment that the cost of providing you with the information requested would exceed the 'appropriate level' as set out in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
My assessment is that it would cost 2,483 (number of records) x 3 minutes each (minimum) = over 124 hours at £25 per hour to respond to your request, which exceeds the 'appropriate limit' (currently £450 for 'prescribed costs').
In view of the above, and in accordance with the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please take this letter as a Refusal Notice.
You may wish to refine and resubmit your request so that it reduces the costs shown above and is then within the 'appropriate limit' shown above. (I cannot think of a means to refine the request in order to provide the information you are seeking) but if you would like some further information about how to proceed with your request then please contact:
Although excess cost removes the Force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill, I have supplied information, relevant to your request, which was retrieved or available before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of your request.
Freedom Of Information legislation concerns recorded information within an organisation, public bodies are not obliged to create/work out data/percentages to facilitate such requests.
1. Incidents Searched Between 2018 and 2024 to end July 2024 inclusive for all incidents whereby NSIR Qualifier Code for Mental Health or Tag Type of Mental/Mental Health has been applied.
a) 7693, b) 5899, c) 5687, d) 4812 e) 4085
Police officers do receive suicide awareness training when learning about 136 powers (Detaining someone under the mental health act). They receive this during their initial training.
In force, anyone who attends a Police Sergeants course or a staff leadership course will receive 2 x half day inputs on the following:
Mental Health First Aid – provided by Mental Health England Mental Health Conversation & Trauma – provided by DWMS
The numerical data presented in this response is an un-audited snapshot of un-published data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that the data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when the data is used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data, we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.