FOI 0808-2025/26- Social media complaints

Request:

Q1. How many times has your force spoken to people, either by visiting their home or workplace or speaking to them elsewhere, after receiving complaints about them that they made comments on social media or in person or in any other format that were offensive but not necessarily a criminal offence?

• Please provide the full number of people spoken to about their behaviour broken down for this calendar year (2025) to date, last calendar year (2024) and the year before (2023).

a. Please provide as much narrative as possible about the nature of the complaint received (were the comments made online or in person or in another form etc.

b. what was the nature of the complaint - ie, what words were allegedly used that formed the alleged bad or offensive behaviour that wasn't necessarily a criminal offence etc. and were they supposedly islamophobic, transphobic, anti-semitic etc.)

c. What was the result in each case that someone was spoken to?

Q2. Has your force ever captured cyclists breaking the speed limit by speed cameras operated by your force?

a. If so, please break down the number of times cyclists triggered speed cameras operated by your force because they were cycling above the speed limit. Please break it down for the current calendar year to date (2025) and last year (2024) and the year before that (2023).

b. For each case, please specify what the speed limit was that was broken by the cyclist - was it a 20mph limit, 30mph, 40mph, 50mph etc.?

c. Were any cyclists arrested or reprimanded for breaking speed limits and if so please specify.

Response: 

Extent of Searches to Locate Information

Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police to locate relevant information. 

Decision

I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt.

Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. 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 required to retrieve that information.

In order to retrieve the requested information, it would be necessary to manually review all records for the timeframe requested to ascertain if an individual has been spoken to regarding comments made on social media or in person that were deemed as offensive. A further review would be needed to establish the nature and outcome of such. This manual process would mean reading through thousands of records which would exceed the time limit allowed under the Act. 

Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.

Pursuant to Section 16 of the Act I am required to offer you advice and assistance with regarding to refining your request to within the ‘appropriate limit’ (time/cost limit). However, we may be able to provide some information for Q2 if you resubmit and omit Q1.  If you wish to discuss this please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data.  It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.