Deaths in Police Custody
In June 2012 the IPCA released a comprehensive report on deaths in police custody - which Justice Lowell Goddard told Parliament's Law and Order Committee was a 'particularly fraught area'. The review was prompted by several deaths of people who were heavily intoxicated and died after being detained in police cells.
The IPCA found there have been 27 deaths in the last ten years: seven occurred after police were overly vigorous in the use of restraint; seven were “caused by the detainees medical condition” which got dramatically worse in police custody; and ten were suicides. Fourteen of the deaths (just over half) involved people affected by mental health issues, including a history of self-harm or suicide attempts. Nearly half of the people who died were affected by alcohol at the time of their arrest, and five of them were only in custody for the purposes of detoxification; one third of those who died were affected by drugs - although in three cases, police failed to ascertain this information.
The police are required to conduct a risk assessment on detainees. The IPCA's investigation found that 85% of the 27 who died were either not assessed at all or were assessed as not being at risk - fifteen of those who died in custody had been assessed by police as being at no risk, and eight had not undergone a formal risk evaluation. Despite the inadequacy of these risk assessments, of the 27 deaths the IPCA said only four "involved serious neglect of duty or breaches of policy by police".
Following their review, the IPCA made 20 recommendations. One was that better training is provided to officers about the dangers associated with restraining people in a prone position with their hands tied behind their back, and that the training "reinforces the risks of positional asphyxia". Another was that detainees who are unconscious or semi-conscious, who are unable to answer the risk assessment questions, and/or physically unable to look after themselves "must be taken to hospital".
Read more about this topic: Independent Police Conduct Authority, Cases Where Civilians Died
Famous quotes containing the words deaths and/or police:
“I sang of death but had I known
The many deaths one must have died
Before he came to meet his own!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,—now under one disguise, now under another,—like a police in citizen’s clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)