Police failures over suicides

FIVE years after The Herald exclusively revealed how police forces had no idea how many officers had taken their own lives, leading to top cops pledging to take action, a senior officer admits they are still not collecting the necessary data.

- CARL EVE

In November 2017 we revealed that of the police officers in Devon and Cornwall who had lost their lives since 2009, a quarter had taken their own lives.

Then in April 2019, after making a series of Freedom of Information requests to all police forces across England and Wales, we reported how it transpired that the majority of forces had little or no information about how many officers have died by their own hand. At that time, officers had highlighted how the cuts to policing budgets, leading to around 21,000 fewer officers than a decade before, as well as cuts to partner agencies, had led to increasing workloads.

Of the 49 forces asked for figures - including British Transport Police, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Ministry of Defence Police, Civil Nuclear Constabulary and Police Scotland - only 39 forces replied and 32 of those forces revealed that while they kept records for how many officers died while in service, none had any details of the causes of death or details regarding suicides.

While just six forces did keep records and could state the number of officers who had taken their own lives, most were unable to go back more than just a few years.

At the time John Apter, the then chair of the Police Federation, said he was surprised the figures were not documented in a formal way and said he would “fully support” a “more formal [reporting] process”, pointing out “you can’t deal with a problem unless you know about the problem”.

Mr Apter said he believed all chief constables “would want to know and I’m absolutely amazed that some of them don’t know it”. The issue was replicated in the US where efforts to determine numbers of officers who had taken their own lives was equally problematic.