What this is
The Independent Office for Police Conduct’s annual statistics on deaths during or following police contact, its twenty-second edition, covering 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026 and published on 30 July 2026.
This entry describes chapter 7, the category of “other deaths following police contact”. It covers deaths after contact with police that did not involve arrest or detention under the Mental Health Act 1983, and where the IOPC opened an independent investigation. It is the part of the series where deaths outside a custody suite are recorded: welfare checks, mental health crises, street contact, ambulance assists.
What it records
Sixty-three deaths fell into the category in the year. The same edition counts 27 deaths in or following police custody, 67 apparent suicides following custody, 15 road traffic fatalities and four fatal police shootings.
Within the 63, twelve people who died had force used against them, and eleven of those twelve were physically restrained by police officers. Of the eleven, six had leg restraints applied by officers. Three of the incidents also involved restraint by members of the public. One involved a bite guard together with PAVA spray, and a further incident involved a Taser discharge.
How to read it
The IOPC states that “the use of force does not necessarily mean it contributed to the death”. That sentence travels with the eleven. This is a count of deaths in which restraint happened, not a count of deaths caused by restraint.
The nearest the series comes to naming restraint in a cause of death is a single entry recording “cocaine intoxication with acute behavioural disturbance in temporal association with restraint”. Association is the word used. The report does not convert it into causation and neither should anyone quoting it.
Two more rules. A death enters the category only if the IOPC opens an independent investigation, so the size of the category is partly a function of investigative capacity. And these eleven must never be added to the ten restrained deaths the same series counts in custody. Different populations, different inclusion rules, no combined total.
Where it stops
One year, England and Wales, one publisher. The figures were read in chapter 7 of the report, and the INQUEST response of 30 July 2026 reports the same eleven from the same release, which is a re-report and not independent corroboration.
The report cannot tell you how many people were restrained by police in the year without dying, so the eleven yields no rate. Nor does this page describe the circumstances of any individual death: each carries its own investigation and, where relevant, its own inquest.
Sources
Restraint outside a custody suite is the case most services plan for least. Our physical interventions training covers positional risk and the monitoring that has to continue after the hold ends.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.