Half of those who die in police custody have mental illness
An "appalling" number of mentally ill people are dying in custody, with half of all the fatalities involving "care in the
community" cases, according to the head of the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
independent.co.uk 17 Jan 06
People with serious mental health problems are being "dumped" on the police - who are ill-equipped to deal with them, warned
Nick Hardwick, the chairman of the commission.
Mr Hardwick said the most shocking discovery he had made since the commission was set up a year ago was the number of mentally
ill people dying in custody.
"The thing that has really struck and appalled me is that 50 per cent of deaths in police custody have involved people
with a mental health problem," he said. "Whatever a police cell is, it's not a place of safety for people with mental illness."
His comments follow a series of high-profile fatalities involving mentally ill people. Thirty-eight people died in police
custody in England and Wales in the year to March 2004.
Mental health charities backed Mr Hardwick and said part of the problem was that pressure on hospital resources was resulting
in mentally ill people being released into the community inappropriately and without proper supervision.
The case of Roger Sylvester, a man who died after going into a coma while being restrained by six policemen at a psychiatric
hospital in Haringey, north London, was one of the most controversial in recent years.
In November last year, a High Court judge quashed an inquest verdict that the 30-year-old had been "unlawfully killed"
during the 1999 incident.
In another case, Giles Freeman, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, died on the floor of a cell in Slough police
station, after being held down by officers and later suffering a heart attack.
The incident that led to the death of the 37-year-old chef in October 2002 began when he suffered a psychotic episode of
paranoid schizophrenia and became violent at his home.
The commission has sent a briefing document to the Government calling for "consistent and adequate emergency NHS services,
so that people experiencing acute mental ill-health can receive rapid, professional and high quality support and treatment".
The commission, which investigates and oversees complaints against the police and cases involving deaths in custody, has
also raised concern at what it describes as the "variable" quality of mental health training of police officers across the
country and called on chief constables and the Home Office to draw up national standards.
"We should be looking upstream to see how mentally ill people get into the system in the first place," he said. "Why are
these people ending up in custody and in confrontations with the police?"
Sophie Corlett, the director of policy at Mind, the mental health charity, said: "Mind has been expressing concern for
many years over the inappropriate use of violent restraint to control people in extreme mental distress. We would like to
see better training and guidance for police, as well as enforced curbs on the use of physical restraint. Police cells are
for people who have committed crimes, they are never appropriate for people who are simply ill. They are not and should never
be used as 'places of safety'."
Michael Howlett, the director of the Zito Trust, which provides advice and support to victims of mentally ill offenders,
said: "The pressure on the health services is so great that they are discharging people inappropriately into the community.
Some of the people discharged have then stopped taking their medication."
THE FINAL HOURS OF TWO PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENICS
A paranoid schizophrenic was shot dead by police when he refused to drop a 3ft-long samurai sword an inquest heard last
month.
Andrew Kernan, 37, was shot twice in the chest by a marksman after he swung the sword at officers in a busy street. Two
attempts to restrain him with CS gas failed. PC Michael Moore fired his weapon in July 2001 after Kernan, a former gardener
from Liverpool, threatened to "chop someone's head off" as he headed towards a pub. The inquest jury at Liverpool coroners
court returned a verdict that Mr Kernan was lawfully killed.
Giles Freeman, pictured right, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, died in a cell in Slough police station.The chef,
37, was taken into custody after suffering a psychotic episode of paranoid schizophrenia at his home in October 2002. He later
tried to escape from his cell and was restrained by several police officers.
An inquest jury returned a verdict that the cause of death was a heart attack "associated with restraint and excessive
activity whilst suffering a psychotic episode of paranoid schizophrenia".
