What this is
The Independent Office for Police Conduct’s twenty-second annual National Statistics report, “Deaths during or following police contact: statistics for England and Wales 2025/26”, published on 30 July 2026.
It counts deaths in or following police custody and records restraint as one characteristic of that group, alongside the type of contact and the force involved. Twenty-five of the 27 deaths were independently investigated by the IOPC.
What it records
Its 2025/26 count is 27 deaths in or following police custody.
Twelve of the 27 had some force used against them, by officers or by members of the public. Ten of those twelve were physically restrained by the police. One of the ten also involved force by security staff.
For one further death, leg restraints were applied, but it cannot be determined whether by police or by medical staff. Another involved restraint by members of the public only.
Five of the twelve force incidents involved leg restraints.
How to read it
The IOPC states the limit itself, in terms:
“the use of restraint, or other types of force, did not necessarily contribute to the deaths”
That sentence is the page. Ten deaths followed a restraint. The document does not say that any of the ten was caused by it, and it makes no assessment of mechanism.
The second rule is structural. There is no “restraint death” category in this series. Restraint is a sub-characteristic of a cohort, so ten is the number of custody deaths that involved restraint, not an incidence figure for restraint deaths and not a rate. The report gives no count of how many restraints were carried out in the year, so no rate can be calculated from it, and anyone who divides ten by anything is inventing a denominator.
The third rule is definitional. The IOPC’s definition covers physical holds and pressure compliance but excludes handcuffs unless another form of restraint was also used. A death after handcuffing alone would not appear in the ten.
Keep three numbers apart: 27 deaths, 12 with force, 10 with restraint by police. Force is broader than restraint, and collapsing the last two overstates the count.
Where it stops
One year, England and Wales, and only deaths in or following police custody. Deaths after other police contact are outside this chapter, and so is restraint by police that did not end in a death, which is the much larger number and is not in this document at all.
The handcuff exclusion narrows the restraint figure. One death’s attribution is undetermined in the report’s own terms, so the ten is a floor as well as a count.
The publication date of 30 July 2026 is taken from the PDF filename and from contemporaneous reporting, because the publication landing page was not opened directly for this entry; the PDF and the HTML chapter were both read and their wording matched.
Nothing here identifies anyone. Each of the deaths has its own investigation, and where there is an inquest, its own conclusion. Those conclusions, not this table, are where causation is decided.
Sources
- Independent Office for Police Conduct, Deaths during or following police contact: statistics for England and Wales 2025/26 (National Statistics, 22nd edition), 30 July 2026
- Independent Office for Police Conduct, deaths in or following police custody chapter
Where restraint is being reviewed after an incident, our physical interventions training covers positional risk and the monitoring that has to continue after the hold ends.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.