If we are going to talk about deaths after police contact – and I think we should – then at some stage we are going to have to define what they are. Some have tried – the current stuff on this is not great, and for a few different reasons we might need to think about so here’s a post on where my head’s been going for the last two months as I’ve been wrestling with some of these ideas for my PhD annual progress review.
It turns out, there isn’t as much written as you might think about what a death after police contact (DAPC) actually is. Several academics, including Dr David Baker (Liverpool) and Professor Ian Loader (Oxford) adopt the definition used by the Independent Office for Police Contact (IOPC), so we probably need to start there. The IOPC has a five-part definition which you can read on p5/6 of their latest annual report on this topic –
- Road traffic collisions
- Fatal police shootings
- Deaths in or following police custody.
- Apparent suicides after police custody.
- “Other” deaths after contact, where independently investigated.
You might have already spotted a couple of problems –
- There is overlap between categories three and four.
- Category five is subject to the “independent investigation” caveat which is nothing to do with the death or the contact, but reflects the type of investigation to review it.
OTHER DEATHS
Category Point five bears some fuller exploration, because of the caveat. If there is “police contact” (and hold that thought for a moment) but the IOPC decide after referral from the police to allow a force’s own Professional Standards Department to investigate it, there is no independent investigation which would then mean the incident does not qualify as a DAPC under category five, “other deaths”. Twice in my police career I was the duty inspector for a tragic event which qualified as a DAPC – only one of them would feature in the IOPC’s data, but they both very definitely involved police contact and two people definitely died, despite my and my officers best efforts.
So we are not counting all the DAPC events which occur – not all suicides which follow release from police custody (point four) will necessarily be flagged up to the IOPC as having involved detention in the cells, prior to suicide occurring and some might not be made known to the IOPC or the police at all. It’s also not clear which definition of suicide is being applied here. On point five, some DAPC events are screened out where there is no independent IOPC investigation and you will also notice on point five, the IOPC are counting all deaths which occur within two days of contact plus others which where it is thought a link to police contact may be relevant.
So the implication here seems to be deaths occurring 47hrs after contact will feature in the data even where no-one believes the police contact played a causal or contributory role; and deaths occuring 49hrs afterwards will only be included if it is thought there is such a role – but in both cases only if there is an independent investigation. A ‘supervised’ investigation, where the IOPC oversee a force’s PSD officers examining the death won’t count, even if it is thought there was a causal or contributory role.
STATISTICS
The IOPC’s annual reports are online for us all to read – they can all be found on one of my resources pages. These reports count as UK statistics on deaths after police contact and in much of the academic literature I have so far found, no-one is really questioning how this definition has been reached or what its limitations are. You might be unsurprised to read I’m especially interested in this because my PhD research on mental health related police contact deaths (MH-PCDs) after the “Right Care, Right Person” scheme, is typically about category five or “other” deaths.
To what extent are they counted?
It’s interesting to contemplate because the words “Right Care, Right Person” do not appear in any of the IOPC’s annual reports. There are a couple of references to deaths in other publications – it would appear the IOPC are aware of two inquests I have been, so far, unable to identify, albeit I am satisfied they are not duplicates of the twenty-seven inquests I have identified. Notwithstanding RCRP deaths might have been unmentioned and uncounted, it has not stopped the Director General, Rachel Watson, from commenting positively about the (unevaluated) programme. I don’t know whether this is in acknowledgement of deaths which go un-reflected in her organisation’s data or despite being unaware of them.
CAUSAL OR CONTRIBUTORY
The final thing for now which struck me in the last few weeks of reading was how little effort is made to even think about the relationship between the fatal outcome and the role played by the police. Of course there are some examples of people with serious healthcare conditions being arrested or encountered and dying of natural causes, where it is far from obvious their police contact played any role at all. In other examples there has been direct, hands-on physical contact, including restraint where the impact of that restraint has “more than minimally contributed” to the fatal outcome, according to an inquest jury. What is worth thinking about further is the role played by and the context determined by police service organisational arrangements even where there was no proximate physical or relational contact.
Mr Nigel Abbott was killed in Birmingham in 2018 by a mental health patient who had been assessed 48hrs before as requiring urgent psychiatric admission, described by the psychiatrist who say him and provided an immediate medical recommendation (under the Mental Health Act) as “a ticking time bomb”. Despite the urgent referral, no MHA assessment was convened, not least because the NHS did not have a bed in to which the patient could be admitted and before than situation changed, the fatal attack took place. The police were unaware of all of this – in that sense it was not a death after police contact because no contact occurred. Non-police professionals did not ring the police, neither did the patient’s family. It was only after Mr Abbott was attacked on his way to the pub, the police were contacted on 999.
At the inquest, the local authority AMHP service gave evidence that their inability to progress the urgent MHA assessment was partly the lack of a bed, but also the fact the police would not help them without a s135(1) warrant and 24hrs notice. Neither of these was true in terms of agreed local policy, but it was the experience of AMHPs in the area they would be told such things if they rang for police support at a MHA assessment. The local policy governing these matters, and the culture created for the AMHPs through their experiences of seeking support, were tempered by the role of the police in determining how that area functioned. That might not amount to contact, but it is – to at least some extent – the police having a potential influence on outcomes even where there is no proximate or relational contact.
Police connected deaths? – police mediated deaths?!
DEFINITIONS
So in some recent work for my supervisors, I’m floating ideas about whether we need a definition, whether it could or should be a wider, deeper definition and to think about the extent to which that would affect our study of police mediated deaths by emphasising not just raw numbers, but the relationship between the police organisation and the fatal outcome.
“A police‑mediated death is any fatality where actions, omissions or institutional arrangements function as mechanisms in a temporal, causal or procedural chain preceding the outcome.”
This is all a work in progress and all views on this gratefully received – what we do know is the IOPC definition and widely uncritical adoption of it means our national data aren’t all we know they could be and what we understand not being the full picture, it limits our attempts to analyse these complex, tragic events more deeply.
And Right Care, Right Person is perhaps especially prone to sit outside all of this because of how the data is collated and then (not) analysed.
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NB: I’m deliberately going to steer well clear of the terminology arguments here, suffice to say I’ve used the term “death after police contact” because it’s part of the IOPC report title and a term adopted by Dr David Baker from the University of Liverpool, who might have done more work on this so far than the rest of us. There might be a post on terminology in the future as almost everything we could choose to use is problematic, in one way or another.
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(c) Michael Brown, 2026
I am not a police officer.
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