What this is
The Independent Review of Deaths and Serious Incidents in Police Custody, commissioned by the Home Secretary and chaired by Dame Elish Angiolini. It began in October 2015 and was published on 30 October 2017.
It examined the circumstances of deaths in custody, the investigation and complaints machinery that follows them, and the contribution of restraint. It has a dedicated chapter on restraint, mental health and the length of prone restraint.
What it records
The review’s central finding on restraint is a sentence worth knowing by heart:
“police practice must recognise that all restraint has the potential to cause death”
It found that positional asphyxia can occur during or after restraint, “for example, in face down or prone restraint”.
It found there was “no consistency of training in restraint techniques across the 43 police forces”.
It found that force and restraint used against anyone in mental health crisis or drug-induced psychosis poses a life-threatening risk, and that restraint-related deaths disproportionately affected Black, Asian and minority ethnic people.
How to read it
This is a system finding, not an incident finding. Nothing in it tells you what happened to any individual, and it should never be cited as though it did.
Its value is that it removes an excuse. A service cannot argue that its restraint technique is safe by default, because the national review says every restraint has the potential to kill, and that the training delivered to the people applying it varied by force.
The disproportionality finding is the part most often left out when the review is quoted. It is part of the same finding, not a separate theme.
Where it stops
Published in 2017, reporting on practice before that. It is evidence about the police service of the mid-2010s, and its recommendations have since been partly addressed and partly not — this page does not track implementation, and no reader should assume the position has changed or improved.
It covers England and Wales. It is a review, so it makes recommendations rather than findings of liability, and it decides nothing about any individual death.
The recommendations commonly cited from the restraint chapter are numbered 11 to 13; this entry does not summarise their text, because the wording was not re-read for this page.
Sources
- Home Office, Independent Review of Deaths and Serious Incidents in Police Custody, 30 October 2017 · https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/deaths-and-serious-incidents-in-police-custody
- Independent Review, full report (292 pages) · https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a821d1040f0b6230269ae98/Report_of_Angiolini_Review_ISBN_Accessible.pdf
Where a restraint is being reviewed after the event, our physical interventions training covers positional risk and the monitoring that has to continue after the hold ends.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.