It’s that time of year again, where the Independent Office for Police Conduct releases their annual report about “deaths during of following police custody” and I dive in to search for various things. On this occasion, it didn’t take me long to see the report continues in a very familiar vein to those from previous years.
HEADLINES
My main purpose in this post is to point a few things specific to mental health, the report obviously also covering police contact death (PCD) topics which are not mental health related, like road collisions and police use of firearms where some are and some aren’t MH related. The headlines are welcome because they are broadly down on previous years, but this seems to be part of the generally fluctuating up and down trend of the last decade –
- 17 deaths in or following police custody, 8 fewer than 2023/24 and just under the average for the last decade (18).
- 8 people were taken ill or were identified as being unwell in a police cell.
- 5 were taken to hospital where they later died.
- 3 people died in a police custody suite.
- 6 people were taken ill at the scene of arrest.
- 4 people were taken to hospital, where they later died. Two people died at the scene.
- One child died while being transported to custody.
- One man died following release from police custody.
- There were two fatal police shootings, same as the previous year.
- There were 60 apparent suicides following police custody, 8 fewer than in the previous year.
- The IOPC investigated 50 other deaths following contact with the police in a wide range of circumstances, a decrease of 12 on 2023/24.
- Deaths are only included in this category when the IOPC has conducted an independent investigation.
This last point is key: I was involved in two police contact deaths during my career, both of them mental health related and neither of those deaths would feature in IOPC statistics because neither of them was independently investigated by the IOPC. They were investigated by the force’s Professional Standards Departments, overseen by the IOPC so they’re not in the data.
Mental health, drugs and/or alcohol:
- Of the 17 people who died in or following custody, 9 had known mental health concerns, and 15 had links to drugs and/or alcohol.
- Over half (29) of those who died following other police contact were reported to be intoxicated by drugs and/or alcohol at the time of the incident, or it featured heavily in their lifestyle; a similar proportion of the people who died were reported to have mental health concerns (32).
- Of the 60 apparent suicides, 37 people had known mental health concerns and 28 people had links to drugs and/or alcohol.
Restraint and use of force:
- Five of the 17 people who died in or following police custody had some use of force against them by the police before their deaths. All five involved use of force by the police. One death also involved use of force by security officers.
- Seven of the 50 other deaths following police contact which were independently investigated, involved restraint or other use of force by police. Three deaths involved restraint by non-police (one involved security guards, one involved prison officers, and another involved the application of leg restraints by paramedics). No deaths involved Taser discharge.
- The use of force did not necessarily contribute to the deaths.
RIGHT CARE, RIGHT PERSON
There is no way to avoid raising this point yet again, I’m afraid and I’m not trying to bore you with it. I think it’s unavoidably necessary.
Right Care, Right Person (RCRP) is not mentioned at all in this report, not even once. This is in keeping with previous reports from the IOPC who have never mentioned it, just as they never mentioned street triage, co-responder schemes. For this reason alone, I admit to feeling a little frustrated, to put it mildly but to then see comments from the Director General (DG) of the IOPC, Rachel Watson, I felt more than a little frustrated.
Rachel Watson said –
“It is disappointing that mental ill health remains a common factor in so many of these deaths. We welcome changes in the Mental Health Bill to end the use of police cells as an appropriate place of safety for those in crisis, as well as the Right Care, Right Person initiative which aims to ensure vulnerable people receive the most appropriate service from the right agency.”
If the IOPC’s leader is formally welcoming RCRP, as she clearly is, then why is there zero analysis of the programme in their deaths in custody report? It’s not possible to see whether the IOPC knows of the various incidents which have already happened and which have completed their journey through the inquest process and could now be commented upon. The report 2024/25 relates to the financial year so more recent deaths and inquests would be excluded, but we know cases from 2022/23 have completed their inquest and investigation stages, as have several from 2023/24. We also know evaluated of RCRP is thus-far limited to two reports from late 2024 which are especially partial and limited, so we don’t really know much about it.
In fairness to the Director, she says only that RCRP “aims to ensure”, rather than the Chief Constable of Humberside who recently stated he is “safe in the knowledge that people in our community are getting the care they need from the most experienced and relevant provider.” The DG is right to phrase it as an aspirational because we already know nothing about RCRP inherently ensures – and I use the word literally – anything else in lieu of a police deployment. I make this point in full acknowledgement the police are often over-relied upon and should be relied upon less – I’ve made that argument on this blog for well over a decade and reflected that in my own work. But the police saying “no” doesn’t mean the “right care” magically appears when often it doesn’t exist and it doesn’t mean sending an ambulance instead is the “right care”. Paramedics are often as limited as police officers, as a recent inquest in Humberside itself made clear.
By all means prefer ambulances to be sent to things than police if you wish – but let’s not pretend that’s always and even often “the right care” for the mixture of human distress which manifests itself as demand across public sector services.
GET REAL
The discussion about all this isn’t grounded in the real world – the IOPC’s report is statistically partial, the IOPC again welcoming RCRP when it hasn’t mentioned any of the seventeen completed inquests, most of which led to Preventing Future Death reports which said something we should be paying attention to if we are serious about this further claim from the Director –
“We will continue to work with others to ensure that learning from these deaths is used to inform improvements to policing. Recommendations we and others make will now be collated in a new national database being developed by the College of Policing. This is a positive development which will help ensure learning from cases is built into future police training and guidance.
I do wonder if the IOPC even know about all of those seventeen cases – it strikes me from reading the detail of them, they may not. I don’t know whether the report authors know about and have read the fifteen PFD notices from Coroners. But finally, what is the learning they reassure us will be built into future police training and guidance? It’s a relevant question given the problems we’ve seen with chief police officers misunderstanding what these inquests were about and with them deciding not to deliver training on mental health which they had formally signed up to delivering and them delivering training which I maintain contains enough legal errors that it should be pulled and redrafted, especially on the meaning of “immediate risk to life” which seems to be a misunderstood notion in many of those inquests and PFDs.
The IOPC have released another annual report which reassures about things they haven’t commented upon in their report and none of us can know whether the report authors or the Director General have understood that material sufficiently to be giving those endorsements. If it “… is disappointing that mental ill health remains a common factor in so many of these deaths” could that be because the mechanisms involved haven’t been fully understood by those who are coming up with solutions to different problems and / or who haven’t learned of the cases which should be shining light on unevaluated programmes.
You might ask your self what could possibly go wrong?
Awarded the President’s Medal, by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Winner of the Mind Digital Media Award
All opinions expressed are my own – they do not represent the views of any organisation.
(c) Michael Brown, 2025
I am not a police officer.
I try to keep this blog up to date, but inevitably over time, amendments to the law as well as court rulings and other findings from inquests and complaints processes mean it is difficult to ensure all the articles and pages remain current. Please ensure you check all legal issues in particular and take appropriate professional advice where necessary.
Government legislation website – www.legislation.gov.uk
Mental Health Cop 