About Policing & Justice FOI Tracker

Policing & Justice FOI Tracker is an independent project that tracks and analyses Freedom of Information (FOI) releases published by UK central government departments and public bodies on GOV.UK. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by HM Government.

Where the data comes from

Every release listed here is sourced from GOV.UK's public Transparency and Freedom of Information releases feed, via GOV.UK's own search API. We currently track 2,996 releases from 31 organisations classified into this site's subject area, out of more than 12,000 FOI releases published across the whole of GOV.UK.

GOV.UK content is reused here under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We link to the original GOV.UK release (and its attachments) on every page — this site is a discovery and analysis layer on top of that data, not a replacement for it.

What GOV.UK's FOI releases do (and don't) cover

GOV.UK's FOI release feed covers central government departments, executive agencies and arm's-length bodies. It does not generally include the 43 territorial police forces or most individual NHS trusts, which publish their own disclosure logs on their own websites. For Policing & Justice FOI Tracker, that means our coverage centres on bodies like the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, HM Courts & Tribunals Service, prisons and probation, and specialist forces such as the Civil Nuclear Constabulary — national policy and regulation, rather than local operational logs.

How releases are classified

Each release is tagged automatically using a transparent, keyword-based classifier: we score its title and description against a curated list of topic keywords, and where a release has no clear keyword match, we fall back to the identity of the publishing organisation (for example, any release from the Ministry of Justice is treated as policing & justice-relevant even if its title is a generic "disclosure log"). A release is only assigned to this site's subject area when the signal is unambiguous — where it's genuinely unclear or split evenly between subject areas, we leave it unclassified rather than guess. This is a heuristic, not a manual review, so it won't be perfect.

How often this updates

The underlying dataset is refreshed on a daily schedule from GOV.UK's API.

Attachments

Many releases link to PDF or CSV attachments on GOV.UK containing the full request and response text. We link to these directly rather than reproducing them, both to respect the source and because it's where the authoritative version lives.