Lies, Damn' lies and Lancashire Constabulary statistics

Somebody admiringly cited statistics related to OpSnap Lancs, gleaned from WhatDoTheyKnow, showing what would indeed be an admirable response rate for submissions. LC claims in its FoI response that 2674 submissions were received at OpSnap between 25.10.21 to 30.11.22, and that 1550 of those had resulted in action being taken against the driver. Cor! 58% of submissions, many of which (but none of mine!) would have been crap, resulting in 'action against the driver'.The War Against the Driver in action in Lancashire!

People should have smelled a rat at an action rate much better than Judge Dredd's and I knew immediately it was wrong. My first submission to OSL was APL101900 on 22.12.21- my last in the period described by LC was  APL109592 on 29.11.22. I made about 400 submissions over the period- since mid May 2022 the great majority were reporting vehicles on the road without MOT. The number of submissions over the period was therefore considerably greater than 7692, which is about 3 times as many as claimed by LC- those claiming that the submissions are not numbered strictly consecutively, or that there are gaps in the allocated numbers are wrong.

I made submission APL107489 on 23.8.22 just before an absence and restarted with APL108065 on 18.9.22- an absence from the area of 25 days. Without my assistance the population of Lancashire made about 575 submissions- so it's about 750 a month when I'm around, which is compatible with the 8000-odd I claim above, and not the 250 submissions a month LC claims

LC is undoubtedly lying, in the usual sense that they know that the information provided by the un-named person in response to the FoI request is untrue- they will have some dodge that there was a misunderstanding, the person providing the response did not know anything about OSL etc etc. So you can be pretty sure that LC is lying about the rest of the figures provided in the FoI response. I have shown that the evasive language used in the 'action letter' (which they have refused to change) allows them to decide, in the end after consideration etc. etc., to do nothing at all- yet that will still be counted as 'action being taken'. LC is unlikely to be the only police force trying tricks like this- we recently saw that Sussex had copied Lancashire's abuse and mis-statement of GDPR regulations to force applicants to agree that they were 'displaying notification on the mode of transport', presumably including legs, that they were filming. Watch out for similar deceptions from your own local force!