Policing FOI Tracker

GOV.UK barely covers your local police force — so we went and got the data ourselves

31 August 2026

Early on, this tracker only used GOV.UK's Freedom of Information feed — and if you'd read this page a week ago, it would have told you honestly that we had almost nothing from the Metropolitan Police, Greater Manchester Police, or any of England and Wales's other 43 territorial forces. That's still true of GOV.UK on its own. It's no longer true of this site.

Why GOV.UK's feed skips them

GOV.UK's Freedom of Information release feed exists for central government departments, executive agencies and arm's-length bodies to publish under government transparency guidance. Territorial police forces are operationally independent of central government, and in practice each force runs its own disclosure log on its own website — dozens of different systems, dozens of different formats, several with no usable historical log at all.

We checked directly: across all 12,000+ FOI releases GOV.UK has ever published, fewer than a handful of organisations with "police" or "constabulary" in their name appear, and by far the largest is the Civil Nuclear Constabulary — a specialist force for civil nuclear sites, not a territorial one.

Where the local-force data actually comes from now

Rather than build and maintain 40-odd separate scrapers for 40-odd different police force websites — several of which, we found, don't publish a usable log at all — we pull individual, citizen-submitted requests from WhatDoTheyKnow, a free FOI service run by the charity mySociety. It's the UK's largest public archive of FOI correspondence, and it already covers every force we checked.

We currently track requests to 46 police forces and specialist policing bodies through WhatDoTheyKnow, alongside the Home Office and Civil Nuclear Constabulary data GOV.UK provides directly. The subjects are the ordinary texture of what people actually ask their local force — a genuine, unedited sample from what we've indexed:

  • "Police Officer Injury Awards put into payment since 2020" — Nottinghamshire Police
  • "Online threats against Chief Constable Vanessa Jardine and related media communications" — Northumbria Police
  • "KSI car crashes" — North Wales Police
  • "External secondments" — West Mercia Police

That's a genuinely different texture from GOV.UK's own releases — more varied, more local, more often about a single force's own operations rather than national policy.

What this means for "coverage"

This tracker now has two sources with two different jobs: GOV.UK for central government policy and specialist national bodies (see our piece on the Home Office and immigration FOI), and WhatDoTheyKnow for the territorial forces GOV.UK never touches. Neither is exhaustive — WhatDoTheyKnow only has what requesters chose to submit through it, and we cap how many historical pages we pull per force in any one sync — but together they're a genuinely broader picture of UK policing FOI activity than either source alone. See our methodology for exactly how each source is combined and classified.