Greater Manchester Police must clear the backlog of hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests - some years old - or find itself in contempt of court.
So says Britain's data watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office, which is today issuing an enforcement notice against the force based in North West England, the third largest in the country with more than 8,000 officers.
The cop shop has 850 FOI requests to process, including upwards of 800 that are over six months old, 580 made more than 12 months ago, and the oldest submitted over two-and-a-half years ago.
Under the FOI Act, public authorities are allowed to take up to 20 working days to file a response to a request, according to the ICO's regulations.
The latest admonition comes after the data regulator issued a practice recommendation to GMP in February after routine monitoring revealed the Manchester cop shop to be the most complained about force over the prior twelve months.
So ends a busy year of interactions between British police and the ICO. In August, an FOI blunder in Northern Ireland exposed a spreadsheet containing details of every serving officer in the country, Cumbria Police also unwittingly disclosed officers' personal information, then Norfolk and Suffolk constabularies made an error when posting raw crime data as part of an FOI request.
Just last week, the ICO fined the Ministry of Defense for a BCC mistake that endangered the lives of Afghan interpreters looking to escape the clutches of the Taliban when US and British troops pulled out of the country.
This Cyber News was published on go.theregister.com. Publication date: Wed, 20 Dec 2023 10:43:04 +0000