West Yorkshire Police recorded 203 arrests and 3,088 officer deployments at Leeds Festival between 2022 and 2025, newly disclosed Freedom of Information data shows. (Source: The Freedom of Information request, response and internal review are published on WhatDoTheyKnow: Leeds Festival policing totals 2022–2025.)
The figures, obtained by The Reasonable Adjustment, give a rare public breakdown of how the festival at Bramham Park has been policed in recent years. The disclosure covers officer deployments, stop-and-search activity, arrest reasons and enforcement outcomes across four festival years.
It also raises a particularly awkward question about 2023. That year saw the highest number of police deployments and the highest number of arrests in the dataset, yet West Yorkshire Police later confirmed there were no stop-and-searches conducted within the Leeds Festival boundaries.
Four years of Leeds Festival policing data
West Yorkshire Police disclosed daily deployment totals for each festival period. These are deployment figures rather than a count of distinct officers, meaning the same officer may be counted across more than one day.
The force said the shifts varied between eight and twelve hours and were spread across early, late and night duties.
| Festival year | Officer deployments | Stop-and-searches within festival footprint | Arrests |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 703 | 2 | 54 |
| 2023 | 857 | 0 | 79 |
| 2024 | 823 | 8 | 50 |
| 2025 | 705 | 3 | 20 |
| Total | 3,088 | 13 | 203 |
The broad pattern is clear. Police deployments rose from 703 in 2022 to 857 in 2023, before easing slightly to 823 in 2024 and 705 in 2025. Arrests followed a more dramatic path, rising from 54 in 2022 to 79 in 2023, then falling to 50 in 2024 and 20 in 2025.
The data does not explain why the arrest total dropped so sharply after 2023. It could reflect changes in offending, policing priorities, intelligence, the operation itself, or a mix of those factors. What the FOI does show is that the number of arrests fell much faster than the disclosed deployment totals.
The 2023 stop-and-search gap looked like an error. Police said it was accurate.
The strangest part of the disclosure concerned stop-and-search activity.
In its original response, West Yorkshire Police provided stop-and-search figures for 2022, 2024 and 2025. The 2023 row was simply absent. That looked, at first glance, like a missing entry or an avoidable reporting error.
| Year | Legal power | Total |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | s1 PACE 1984 | 1 |
| 2022 | s47 Firearms Act 1968 | 1 |
| 2024 | s1 PACE 1984 | 2 |
| 2024 | s23 Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 | 6 |
| 2025 | s23 Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 | 3 |
An internal review challenged the omission and asked the force to clarify whether the 2023 figure was zero, not held, accidentally left out, or missing for some other reason.
West Yorkshire Police then confirmed:
“There were no stop searches conducted within the Leeds Fest boundaries.”
The force also accepted that this should have been made clear in the initial response, apologising for the oversight.
That confirmation makes the 2023 figures difficult to ignore. It was the busiest year in the dataset by disclosed deployment total, and the year with the most arrests, but police say there were no stop-and-searches within the festival boundaries.
That does not mean arrests could only have come from one type of policing. Arrests may follow intelligence, direct observation, security referrals, searches after arrest, or events outside the exact category asked about in the FOI. But the contrast remains stark. In 2023, West Yorkshire Police recorded 857 deployments, 79 arrests, and zero stop-and-searches within the festival boundaries.
West Yorkshire Police refused to disclose the uniformed and non-uniformed split
The FOI also asked West Yorkshire Police to break down deployments between uniformed and plainclothes or non-uniformed officers, or to provide the closest equivalent category held.
The request was deliberately narrow. It did not seek deployment locations, timings, surveillance methods, officer-level detail or operational plans. It asked only for historic aggregate figures across festival years already gone.
West Yorkshire Police refused to disclose the split under section 31 of the Freedom of Information Act, which covers law-enforcement prejudice. The force argued that releasing the number of uniformed and non-uniformed officers could reveal policing tactics for future events and help people identify patterns in how festivals are policed.
That refusal was challenged at internal review. The review argued that broad historic totals were a very long way from live tactical detail, and asked whether a less sensitive version could be disclosed, such as a range, a partial breakdown, or confirmation that non-uniformed deployments were only a minority of the total.
West Yorkshire Police refused again. It said that even a category, band or partial figure could cause harm by allowing people to “identify and map patterns of tactics” across festival years. It also maintained a separate neither-confirm-nor-deny position under section 31(3) in relation to any further tactical information connected to the operation.
The result is a public record that shows the overall scale of the police presence, but not how much of it was visible to festivalgoers and how much was not.
That omission becomes more relevant in light of 2023. The force has confirmed there were no stop-and-searches within the festival boundaries that year, despite the highest arrest count and deployment total in the dataset. Yet it will not say how many of those deployments were non-uniformed.
Drug-supply allegations dominated the arrest data
The arrest reason table shows that suspected drug-supply offending formed the largest part of Leeds Festival arrest activity across the four years.
The single biggest category was possession with intent to supply Class A cocaine, with 49 arrests recorded between 2022 and 2025. Other major categories included PWITS Class A other, with 27 arrests, PWITS Class A MDMA, with 26 arrests, and PWITS Class B ketamine, with 11 arrests.
| Selected arrest reason | Total arrests, 2022 to 2025 |
|---|---|
| PWITS – Class A cocaine | 49 |
| PWITS – Class A other | 27 |
| PWITS – Class A MDMA | 26 |
| PWITS – Class B ketamine | 11 |
| Concerned in the supply of Class A drugs | 6 |
Those five categories alone account for 119 of the 203 arrests recorded across the four festival years. Other supply-related categories, including attempts to supply, direct supply offences and possession with intent to supply cannabis or amphetamine, push the total higher still.
The data was not limited to drug offences. Across the same period, West Yorkshire Police also recorded:
- 5 rape arrests;
- 8 sexual assault arrests;
- 1 arrest reason relating to administering a substance with intent to stupefy or overpower someone to allow sexual activity;
- 7 theft arrests;
- and a range of assault, public order and other offences.
That wider mix is important. Festival policing is not solely about drug enforcement, and the figures include serious allegations of sexual and violent offending. Even so, the arrest pattern disclosed by West Yorkshire Police was heavily led by suspected supply offences, especially Class A drug supply.
The internal review also forced a clearer presentation of the outcome data
The original FOI asked for aggregate totals for arrests, charges, summonses and out-of-court disposals. Instead, West Yorkshire Police initially provided detailed arrest-by-arrest schedules.
Those schedules were useful, but they were not what had been asked for. They left the requester to do the collation work despite the FOI being framed around summary figures from the outset.
The internal review challenged that handling and asked the force to provide grouped totals where possible. West Yorkshire Police rejected that part of the complaint in principle, saying Freedom of Information only covers information held at the time of the request, and that once the underlying data had been disclosed, the burden of reformatting it sat with the recipient.
It then provided the aggregated tables anyway, calling this a “gesture of goodwill”.
That extra disclosure was useful. It gave a clearer picture of what happened to arrest cases after the initial arrest stage, including charges, summonses, community resolutions, cautions, no further action outcomes and investigations that were still recorded as ongoing at the point the data was prepared.
West Yorkshire Police said it did not hold court outcome data
The FOI also asked whether the force held conviction, acquittal or post-charge discontinuance data for Leeds Festival cases.
West Yorkshire Police said it did not hold that information in relation to the request. It explained that the detailed festival arrest outcome records stop at the point of charge, partly because court proceedings can take a long time to conclude.
That means the disclosure is strongest on policing inputs and immediate enforcement outcomes, rather than the final destination of cases in court.
What the figures show
The Leeds Festival FOI does not reveal every part of the policing operation, and West Yorkshire Police has made clear that it will not disclose the uniformed versus non-uniformed split. Even so, the figures put several hard facts into the public domain.
- There were 3,088 recorded officer deployments across Leeds Festival between 2022 and 2025.
- There were 203 arrests in the same period.
- The highest deployment and arrest totals both came in 2023.
- What looked like a missing 2023 stop-and-search entry was later confirmed by police as zero stop-and-searches within the Leeds Festival boundaries.
- The force refused to disclose the uniformed and non-uniformed deployment split, even in historic aggregate form.
- The arrest data was strongly led by suspected drug-supply offences.
The most uncomfortable part of the disclosure is not hidden in a complex appendix. It is right there in the basic totals. The year with the largest police presence and the most arrests was also, according to West Yorkshire Police, a year with no stop-and-searches carried out within the festival boundaries.
Further reading
- Prescribed medical cannabis at events, gigs and festivals — practical guidance for patients attending concerts, festivals and public events with lawful medication.
- FOI reveals how the Met Police dealt with 737,198 speeding cases in 2025 — another large policing dataset obtained through FOI, showing how enforcement figures can expose patterns that public bodies rarely explain upfront.
- FOI reveals how West Yorkshire Police dealt with 277,069 speeding cases in 2025 — a separate West Yorkshire Police disclosure examining high-volume enforcement data and how the force records outcomes.
- MC Viper, Sam Shackleton and the Wigan Knockout Audit Video — a wider accountability piece on public-space policing, conflict, and what happens when authority is exercised badly in front of a camera.
Source: The Freedom of Information request, response and internal review are published on WhatDoTheyKnow: Leeds Festival policing totals 2022–2025.
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