Local Freedom of Information campaigner shares full archive of recent police questions and answers

Police vans at the RBS headquarters in Edinburgh during 2010's Climate Camp | pic: Michael MacLeod

Edinburgh's local police force has made another full month's worth of Freedom of Information answers available online. 

The large data dump includes crime logs for local schools, registered sex offender records and details of police sickness and misconduct proceedings. 

The information was obtained by citizen journalist Michael Traill, a council worker from Portobello. Read more about him here. He says on his blog:

"One change that I think should be made to FOISA (the Freedom of Information Scotland Act) is that everybody that is subject to the act must provide an online archive of its responses to requests for information.
"I firmly believe there is a public interest in all responses being made available to everyone."

Traill is often contacted by news reporters asking him for comment on background on the facts he uncovers. His investigations often lead to national news stories. 

He was first to report that last year's Climate Camp protests in Edinburgh cost police £650,000. We linked to the information he got for February in this post. 

You can download the information for March at this link. As Traill points out, it's a big document. 

Thursday 5 May 2011