Your Request

I'm requesting data on children under 18 who have had a Taser fired at them (meaning the probes were deployed) by officers at your pole force between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2025.

Please provide the following, broken down by calendar year in a table:

1. The total number of children under 18 who had a Taser fired at them in each
2. The child's self-defined ethnicity (White, Black, Asian, Mixed, Other, or Not Stated).
3. The total number of incidents where the child was aged 10 or under, and the total aged 11 to 17.
4. The recorded reason the Taser was fired (for example: serious or aggravated resistance, aggressive resistance, active resistance).
5. Whether the child was found to be carrying a weapon, and if so what
6. Whether the child sustained an injury, and if so what

On points 2 and 3: Looking at previous FOI's I know some forces have declined to provide ethnicity and age data on the grounds it could identify a child.

To be clear, I'm only asking for aggregate totals, not individual records.

That's not personal data under section 3(2) of the Data Protection Act 2018, and it wouldn't meet the ICO's motivated intruder test for identification. Several other forces have already provided exactly this, and I'm happy to share examples of how they've done it.

Freedom of Information Act 2000

I can confirm that the information requested is held in part by Durham Constabulary. I have detailed below the information that is being released to you, noting that the data provided is based on occurrences of a taser being categorised as 'discharged' and does not include 'drawn', 'red-dotted' or 'arced' and is only recorded from 01 April 2017 onwards.

Question 1, 2 and 3

All 19 individuals tasered self-defined ethnicity was white and they were all within the 11 - 17 years age range.

Question 4

Please refer to the table below which details the reasoning for the taser being discharged, noting that multiple options can be selected for each taser discharge and the years in which no under 18s were tasered do not feature.

Question 5

On 10 of the 19 occasions a taser was discharged and the subject was aged under 18 years, an impact factor was listed as 'possession of weapon'. This means that the officer who discharged the taser believed the individual was carrying a weapon as part of their decision to use force. This dataset that is readily extractable does NOT mean that the individuals were confirmed to be in possession of a weapon.

Question 6