What happened
In September 2016 Sussex Police received a call from a member of the public who was concerned about a man running in and out of the traffic. A second caller said he was “getting worse and was jumping in front of lorries”.
Officers arrived and tried to pull him out of the road, and could not. More officers arrived and restrained him, and he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly.
He was taken into custody, medically assessed there, and then to hospital. During the examination he suffered a medical episode and stopped breathing. Emergency treatment followed. He was placed in a coma and discharged after a period of treatment. He did not die.
The outcome
The Independent Office for Police Conduct investigated the restraint as a death or serious injury matter. It concluded that there was no indication any officer had behaved in a manner that would justify disciplinary proceedings, or had committed a criminal offence. No charges were brought and no misconduct proceedings followed.
A medical consultant’s expert opinion was that the man had had a cardiac arrest due to drug abuse, and that police restraint was not a contributory factor.
What went wrong
On the restraint itself the finding was no fault, and the evidence base was not thin. Six members of the public who witnessed the incident gave statements, alongside officers and the man himself, and investigators compared CCTV, body-worn camera and mobile phone footage, and radio and telephone downloads.
What the record does not contain is how long the restraint lasted, what it consisted of, or what monitoring happened between the roadside and the hospital. The conclusion that restraint did not contribute rests on a medical opinion about the cause of the arrest, not on the hold being examined and approved.
What it teaches
A man running into traffic and fighting restraint is a medical emergency before he is a criminal justice problem.
The trainer’s ground is monitoring and interpretation. Watch the person continuously after restraint, and treat a collapse as a medical event rather than as continued non-compliance. A person who goes quiet after a struggle has not necessarily calmed down. Quiet is a clinical sign, and it is the one most often misread.
The second lesson is what a cleared investigation proves. Regulators answer the question in front of them. When the answer is that the force did not cause the collapse, the operational question of whether anyone was watching him is left exactly where it was.
Questions for the room
- Two members of the public called before officers arrived. What did they describe that should have shaped the response?
- He goes quiet during the examination. What are your next three actions, and who is timing them?
- The regulator cleared the officers on a medical opinion. Does that answer whether the post-restraint monitoring was good enough?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: probable. There is one source, the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s investigation summary, reference 2016/072544, published 16 January 2019, and it was read.
No press, court or inquest record of the same event was located. The account here is the regulator’s, and the medical opinion is reported as an opinion.
The record does not state the type or duration of the restraint, and this page does not supply them.
The man is not named. The record does not carry his name, and none is used here.
If your staff are the ones watching someone after a restraint, our vulnerable, volatile persons training covers the transition from agitated to unresponsive.
Sources
Reviewed 20 October 2026.