The latest annual publication from the Independent Office for Police Conduct is just out, covering their “Deaths during or following police custody or contact” for 2025/6 – and you can find all the other IOPC reports for previous years on one of my resources pages.
Across the five categories of deaths counted by the IOPC, the statistical highlights for this year are –
- 15 fatal road traffic collisions
- 4 fatal police shootings
- 27 deaths in or following police custody
- 67 apparent suicides after police custody
- 63 other deaths which were independently investigated by the IOPC.
Before you read much further, it’s worth remembering how the IOPC counts these things. They are recognised by the National Audit Office as good quality statistics, but we know there are some problems with overlaps between categories and especially with what ends up included and excluded from category five, the “other deaths”.
You can read more about that in a recent blog. but it would be remiss of me not to point out that “Right Care, Right Person” goes unmentioned by the IOPC for the sixth year in a row. Despite it being unevaluated and despite IOPC endorsement of the programme, despite 23 Preventing Future Death reports from His Majesty’s which should cause questions to be raised about the programme and despite IOPC materials which show they have had to make recommendations, the programme is literally unmentioned in the annual report – again.
DOING THE DETAIL
- Of the 27 deaths in or following police custody, 2 were detentions under section 136 Mental Health Act 1983 and there was a further section 136 connected death in category four, apparent suicides.
- Amongst those 27 deaths, 18 involved people known or thought to have mental health problems at the time and of the apparent suicides after police custody, two thirds (43) involved people with mental health problems.
- 10 of the 27 who died in custody were restrained by the police.
The report doesn’t cross over these various themes in the deaths, so we don’t know, for example, how many of those restrained were also those who had known or suspected mental health problems, etc.
INQUEST
I’ve always been a supporter of the organisation Inquest, notwithstanding their existence is due to the need to criticise the profession I worked in for decades. It’s a non-statutory, third-sector organisation but a very necessary one, in my view and they impressively resists government funding because of a desire to be entirely independent of the state it exists to challenge and therefore its money.
They rightly highlight difficulties families face in securing information, accountability or justice for loved ones who died in state contact. I’ve always agreed, for example, with their point that we see difficulties in the way the police message in the aftermath of a death after police contact and we saw this again recently after a death in Salford, Greater Manchester just over a week ago.
Inquest have also been shouting loudly for years about the problems with our Preventing Future Deaths report system, highlighting that reports are often alike, they should lessons claimed to have been learned are not only unlearned, but sometimes actively resisted. I invited Deborah Coles, Inquest’s executive director, to the College of Policing / National Police Chiefs Council conference in Oxford in 2017 and she said something to an audience of officers, including very senior officers, which I immediately wrote down and have quoted several times on this website and elsewhere –
“The police are not just guilty of failing to learn lessons, they are guilty of repeatedly failing to learn repeated lessons.”
After all my time involved in this business, I struggle to disagree with Deborah – it was very well delivered truth to power.
NO-ONE SHOULD DIE
Inquest’s press release on the IOPC’s recent report is a little tricky, for me. Even whilst making allowance for press releases being better when brief, not taking in complexity and nuance, etc., there are still a few bits here I felt needed a gentle nudge, with love.
It’s perfectly fair comment to point out fatal police shootings, many of which do involve those of us adversely affected by our mental health, are up and at a high point over the last decade-ish. But we’re talking really small numbers here, so any fluctuation in the annual incidents is always going to be a large percentage figure up or down. This report gives us four fatal shootings, last year it was two – so it’s a 100% increase, yes. But if you look over the last ten years, the numbers fluctuate within a very low range. Every year for more than a decade, there have either been 2/3/4 fatal police shootings, which roughly works out below 0.5 fatal shootings per 10-million people. You can compare that with any European or Commonwealth country and you’ll find the overall British approach keeps fatal police shootings to a level that between a quarter or twentieth of anywhere else you want to compare it to.
This doesn’t mean, of course, the UK shouldn’t do all it can to minimise these events, but I’d argue from having been inside those structures that it does; and it does it really well. I’ve never seen any controversy around a police shooting in recent times as justified – and yes, I really mean that. In fact, I’d go so far to say that I think firearms officers would be justified in using potentially fatal force more often than they do (I’ve seen a load of body worn video you haven’t seen) and I’d like to see more ARVs on duty given problems with incidents like Hainault where unarmed officers felt obliged to heroically stop an ongoing attempt to slaughter people were seriously injured because an ARV was too far away for them to wait.
NO-ONE SHOULD BE DYING
So this leaves me with Inquest’s statement about people dying “at the hands of the police”. Even whilst making all possible allowances for what those words might mean, I still find the notion problematic. Of course, the police should strive to achieve a zero-contact death rate as an aspiration, but let’s be honest about what the police do and what they can control.
- The factors which determine whether someone dies “at the hands of the police” are simply not controlled by the police alone.
- Sometimes, it really is the job of the police to turn up to an incident and stop a threat in such a way as to render it more than otherwise someone will die.
Yes, we can point to deaths where the police have played a causal or contributory role. Across almost all such deaths, there will be a range of factors playing in to the outcome – my experience of this policy area and of being an expert witness in a number of inquests is there is very rarely one, simple explanation at play in these things. Sometimes people have underlying healthcare conditions, alcohol or substance use or misuse, sometimes there is neglect by other agencies pre-dating any police involvement, which is also contributory to the outcome according to Coroner’s juries. The police service can’t ensure – ie, they make certain – that every patient at risk of suicide or homicide receives appropriate mental health care in the hours, days or weeks prior to a 999 call. Indeed, the police may not know of the emerging situation of risk at all.
Sean Rigg (2008), Seni Lewis (2010) and Leon Briggs (2013) – all controversial, high-profile deaths after police contact where officers were criminally investigated for potential liabilities and considerations of gross misconduct – and fair enough, all three cases highlighted serious problems in policing. However, all three are examples of where neglect by NHS services contributed to the outcome according to the Coroner’s juries. Indeed, if the police had followed police guidance in one of these cases, the medical evidence at inquest was that the person involved would most likely have survived – it was NHS caussed things to go another way. I hope, whilst acknowledging police shortcomings in all three examples, it is fair to point out how frustrating it can be to see little-to-no mention about the role the NHS played creating conditions to which the police had to respond at little notice and the role NHS played in failing to give clinical guidance or leadership at appropriate points in the police response.
GUILTY OF FAILING
The police are guilty of repeatedly failing to learn repeated lessons – I have no issues with that and indeed, my PhD research is predicated on full acceptance of that premise. This can be true at the same time as an argument the police are unable to control all of the variables which may put officers in particular positions where action is both necessary and unavoidable. Even knowledge of the raised risk of a death in some situations cannot mean the police avoid taking action which may, for example, involve restraint, which is always high-risk business. The risk of not acting may be even greater and when I make this point I always remember two incidents from my own experience:
- A very tricky Saturday afternoon and evening dealing with a situation where a mental health patient in need of detention had barricaded himself in to a bedroom with a knife.
- He had a history of violence, prison, secure psychiatric care and everything the British police could do was tried at length, before a resort to force – all the while me acutely aware a psychiatrist had said “This is your next death in custody unless you handle this carefully.”
- Sobering – we handled it carefully, but restraint was unavoidable because when we tried to detain him, he attempted to stab my officers with his knife. He emerged safely detained with only minor injuries.
- In the other, a trick Sunday afternoon and evening was spent searching for a man who had committed a very serious offence immediately after release from prison and then started telling his family he would take his own life.
- We urgently searched for him, knowing full well if we found him, he would be arrested unless he went through with the threat to harm himself. He decided to do that in front of me and two of my officers and died of his injuries, but contact with him was unavoidable because the risk to him and to others was incredible high.
- If the risk to him was heightened by police contact, then it was justified because of the risk to others where there was a clear, unambiguous legal duty to protect them from serious harm.
Adverse outcomes can occur despite all officers’ best efforts and intentions and as a result of entirely proportionate, accountable, lawful and necessary action, including force.
If we really are going to impact these incidents in a way which leads to further reduction in their number, remembering we have internationally very low police contact death figures, we need to look at systemic mitigation of the risks of these events. Given we don’t really have a “system” to start with – we have disparate, unconnected organisations acting unilaterally in an ungoverned culture – we probably need to start there and we need to keep the scale of our problem in check.
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, 2026
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
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