Public Order Political Demonstrations

I am writing to you about the retention of images on databases held by your force for the purposes of policing public order and political demonstrations

In May last year, there was a court of appeal ruling over the long-term retention of images on police databases in what was known as the Andrew Wood case.

The court in essence ruled that the Metropolitan police had been unlawfully holding the images of Andrew Wood after he was photographed leaving a public meeting. It is apparent that after the ruling, the Metropolitan police reviewed its policy on the storage of images gathered through overt photography. It decided to delete around 40 per cent of the images held on its public order branch unit (CO11) database to ensure that it was compliant with the ruling.

We would like to ask what action the Cheshire police force took in the wake of the Andrew Wood ruling. In particular we would like to ask whether your force reviewed the number of images on its databases and if so, a) what percentage of the images on your databases were removed after this review, b) which units within your forces are responsible for each of these databases and what are the names of these databases, and c) how many images are currently being
stored on these databases.

We would also like to ask what considerations did your force take into account in taking this action.

Finally we would like to ask what is your criteria for keeping images on databases held by your force for the purposes of policing public order and political demonstrations, particularly the length of time such images are stored for (if this is set out in a policy, we would be grateful if you could send us a copy).

In accordance with section 1 (1) (a) of the Act our response is provided below;

There is no information held. The Cheshire Constabulary does not utilise such a database.