What we can tell you · Available
How many people die in or following police custody, and what is their ethnicity?
Available An official publication answers the question directly. Where it is not yet on this site, the entry says so.
Why
The Independent Office for Police Conduct publishes "Deaths during or following police contact" annually (2025/26 edition published 30 July 2026): 27 deaths in or following custody, 15 road traffic fatalities, 4 fatal shootings and 67 apparent suicides following custody. Time-series tables give sex, age and ethnicity of the deceased from 2004/05, and Table A5 gives type of death by force.
What is known
What is not known
- The IOPC is not yet a registered source on this site, so the figures are not shown here
Who holds the data
- Independent Office for Police Conduct
Would a Freedom of Information request help?
Unlikely. The statistics are published annually with data tables.
Privacy and disclosure restrictions
Counts are in single digits for most categories in most years; no suppression is applied but the numbers do not support rates by ethnicity for a single year.
Official sources checked
- https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/our-work/research-and-statistics/annual-deaths-statistics
- https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/publications/annual-deaths-during-or-following-police-contact-report-202425
Last reviewed 2026-09-02. Availability changes; if a publication now answers this question, challenge the classification below.