Police forces are the likeliest body we track to say they don't hold what you asked for

Up to now, everything on this site has been built from titles, short excerpts, and the topic tags we derive from them. We've recently started pulling the full text of responses themselves — the actual letters, not just what they're about — for GOV.UK releases and police force transparency-portal write-ups. Over 5,000 policing & justice documents now have real body text behind them, and reading it in bulk surfaces things a title never would.

The most common outcome isn't a refusal

Across every response we've indexed, the single most frequent thing a public body says is some version of "we do not hold this information" — not a data table, not an exemption, just an admission that no record exists to answer the question. It happens in 10.7% of policing & justice responses, a higher rate than in any other part of this dataset (health bodies: 8.1%; everything else GOV.UK publishes: 7.2%).

That's a striking number given how specific and operational a lot of policing requests are. A representative one: "Last time breathalysers were calibrated" — a real question, asked of a real force, that most likely doesn't map to any field in any database anyone maintains. A lot of "not held" isn't obstruction; it's the gap between what a member of the public assumes gets recorded and what actually does.

It's also worth reading against a second number: policing responses cite Section 40 (personal data) — the exemption you'd reach for to protect an identifiable individual — in only 1.8% of documents, well below the health sector's 4.9%. Police forces handle enormous amounts of identifiable, sensitive data day to day. The gap suggests that when policing FOI doesn't produce an answer, it's usually because nothing was ever recorded that way, not because a person needed protecting.

Two very different ways of saying no

GOV.UK's own FOI releases and police forces' own transparency portals write refusals in almost unrecognisably different registers.

A typical GOV.UK entry reads like a short cover note:

We released the following information on 10 September 2013. The attached reply is based upon where cases where firearms have been fired in the course of a criminal offence which has been recorded by the police.

A typical Metropolitan Police portal entry, by contrast, is a formal legal document with named sections every time something is withheld — because Section 17 of the Act requires it. One example, from a records request about a 1962 Special Branch surveillance file:

I have today decided to disclose some of the requested information. Some data has been withheld as it is exempt from disclosure and therefore this response serves as a Refusal Notice under Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act)... Certain content... has been withheld under exemption provisions due to the sensitive nature of the material... exempt under Section 31(1)(a)(b)... Furthermore, Section 23(1) prohibits the disclosure of any material that would reveal the extent of involvement by security bodies.

Same law, same force type, two completely different documents depending on which platform answered you. If you're comparing how "open" two forces are from tone alone, you're partly just comparing which system they publish through — see our piece on why GOV.UK barely covers your local force for the rest of that platform gap.

Comparing forces directly - for the few we actually can

Most territorial forces reach us through WhatDoTheyKnow, and we deliberately don't pull full response text from there (see our about page for why) - so a genuine force-by-force comparison is only possible for the handful with GOV.UK or transparency-portal text behind them. That's three forces today, not forty-three, and worth reading as an early look rather than a league table: the Civil Nuclear Police Authority cites a refusal or exemption in 49.0% of what we can read, the Metropolitan Police Service in 18.6%, and British Transport Police in just 4.7%. We've written up the full ranking, alongside non-policing bodies, separately.

What people are actually asking

Reading the requests behind these responses, the sharpest recurring shape isn't a single number — it's a number broken down by something. A recent Met Police request asked for police officer dismissals for misconduct broken down by year, offence category, gender, and ethnicity together. That's not idle curiosity; it's a request built specifically to surface disparity, and it's a pattern that recurs constantly across the misconduct and disciplinary requests we've indexed.

Sitting alongside those are subjects that are more mundane but still genuinely requested at volume: dangerous dogs, fixed penalty and speeding fines, RIPA and covert-surveillance authorisations, and — increasingly — facial recognition. The immigration and asylum requests we've written about separately follow the same broken-down-by-something pattern, just at Home Office scale rather than force level.

Reading this responsibly

This is based on full response text where we have it — GOV.UK bodies and police-portal write-ups — not on WhatDoTheyKnow's individual request pages, which sit behind bot-protection strong enough that we've chosen not to force it (more on that trade-off, and why, is on our about page). Percentages here measure whether a phrase or section number appears in the text, not a legal judgement on why something was actually withheld — a document can mention Section 40 while explaining why it doesn't apply. Read these as what the documents talk about, not a verdict on any individual case.