Coroners, courts, regulators and inspectors have recorded what restraint does to the people it is used on. This casebook publishes those records as short, sourced case pages: what happened, what went wrong, and what it means for the people running the service.
Every entry states its confidence, what could not be verified, and where the source runs out. Where a case is still live, we hold it. Where a name cannot be justified, we do not print it. Publications are labelled as publications, because a national count is not an incident.
22 case entries and 8 publications.
Six hundred thousand restraint reports, and not one of them a death
According to Home Office figures, 812,447 use of force reports were recorded in England and Wales in the year to March 2025, 628,307 of them involving a restraint…
A knee in the back of the neck of a man already in handcuffs
He was handcuffed and leg-strapped, then moved by the neck and pinned with a knee in his neck; he survived, and the officer was found to have committed…
PublicationThe review that said all restraint can kill
A Home Office review of 1,000-plus police custody deaths concluded that every restraint carries the potential to cause death, and that training was inconsistent across all 43 forces.
Left face down in a locked room for 28 minutes
A student detained under the Mental Health Act was restrained twice in four days, then left face down and unobserved until his heart stopped.