Drink driving arrests (FOI)

Produced by the Freedom of Information office
Authored by Government of Jersey on behalf of the States of Jersey Police and published on 10 June 2019.
Prepared internally, no external costs.

Request

A

How many people have been arrested for drink driving in Jersey in the last five years, 2014 to 2018?

B

Of those arrests, how many have been charged for in the last five years, 2014 to 2018?

Response

A

Offence categories are not automatically applied to custody records. Instead, custody officers rely on free-text to record the reason for arrest. Depending on the circumstances, different terminology may be used, for example, “unfit”, “over the prescribed limit”, “drink driving”, or “drunk in charge”.

In order to accurately access the number of persons arrested under the various terms that fall under the umbrella of “drink driving”, manual research of each custody record would be required. During the period in question, over 14,000 custody records were created. Even estimating that it would take just 10 seconds per record, this would take almost 40 hours of work, meaning that the cost of complying with this request would exceed the cost limit, and is therefore exempt from disclosure.

B 

​	2014	2015​	2016​	2017​	2018​	Total​
​Article 27(1) (as amended) Road Traffic (Jersey) Law 1956 – driving or attempting to drive , or in charge of a vehicle on a road or other public place whilst unfit to drive a vehicle through drink or drugs	​16	8​	12​	10​	7​	53​
​Article 28(1) Road Traffic (Jersey) Law 1956 – driving or attempting to drive , or in charge of a vehicle on a road or other public place whilst over the prescribed limit	​113	118​	110​	95​	92​	528​
​Article 29(4) Road Traffic (Jersey) Law 1956 - fails to provide a specimen of breath at the roadside when required to do so	​3	0​	5​	2​	4​	14​
​Article 30(2) Road Traffic (Jersey) Law 1956 -  fails to provide a specimen of breath at the police station when required to do so	​12	12​	15​	18​	9​	66​
​Total	​144	138​	142​	125​	112​	661​

 

Article applied

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.