The Custodial Review interviewed Maria Hanam who conducted the research for the IPCC She is a senior research officer and has worked for the IPCC for six and half years. She did a degree in law and then a masters degree in criminology and started off her career at the Home Office where she worked on research within the police service.

CR    the Custodial Review
MH    Maria Hanam

CR    when did you start researching this report on deaths in custody?
MH    It would have been in 2008.  I’ve worked on a number of studies before this; one was on mental health in police custody, looking at police custody as a place of safety under the Mental Health act.  I’ve also worked on deaths and serious injuries arising from road traffic accidents.

CR    For this report on deaths in police custody where did you draw the data from?
MH    They are all police custody incidents throughout the custodial sector and deaths following police contact during each year.  We publish annual statistics broken down into different groups.  And the way we define that is it’s not just a death in a police station but will include deaths following an arrest such as restraint.  They may have a heart attack following that and this would be included in the report.

CR    After release from custody, at what point would it still be related to custody?
MH    We include deaths if someone dies after they have been released; in other words, if their injuries were related to the period of time that they had been detained, or if there was some concern that they hadn’t been medically treated properly while they had been detained.

CR    Has there been a reduction or increase in the number of years leading up to this report?
MH    The trend has actually been a downward fall in numbers.  There were a total of 333 deaths in an eleven-year period that we studied, and that spans from 1998 to 2009.  The first year that we studied, there were 49 deaths and that fell to 15 in the last year of the study.

CR    With the increase in the number of people locked up over that given period of time the decrease is even more dramatic than the raw numbers suggest?
MH    Yes, absolutely, we calculated rates per hundred thousand notified arrests, which isn’t quite the same as the increase in custodial population, and it varied from 3.6 per hundred thousand, to one per hundred thousand in the final year of the study.  The custodial population has risen over that period but the number of deaths hasn’t.

CR    An almost two-thirds decrease, it’s going in the right direction even though a single death is not a good thing.  The must have been changes in how the deaths are being recorded over the years, how did you compare one year with another if this is the case?
MH    We use the same definition over the whole eleven-year time period, so we went back and gathered information based on that standard definition.  In terms of the way deaths were reported prior to that period of research, the police complaints authority reported things in a slightly different way, which is why we didn’t rely on figures that they had produced. We then applied our own definition over the whole period of study.

CR    So did you go through all the cases during that time period and using the same criteria reclassify them? That must have been quite a job.
MH    Yes it was, that’s why the whole thing took such a long time.

CR    So how many cases did you examine over that period?
MH    Probably about four hundred samples from the data that we originally had.

CR    So the report was based on a sample of four hundred over a period of eleven years?
MH    That is a rough estimate; the entire data wouldn’t have been within that same definition.  Some of them would have been recorded under what we would term, other police contacts.

CR    Over the eleven-year period, how did the types of deaths in custody change?
MH    We tried to break these down into causes of deaths as it’s difficult to break them down into a reason. For example there was a large reduction in the number of suicides over that period.  There were forty-four over the study period of which thirty-four were hangings, and of those, fourteen occurred in the first year of the study.  Although those numbers are quite small, there do seem to be fewer suicides by hanging in the more recent years, and the same with other categories of death like accidental overdosing.  Injuries received prior to detention also fell.  Natural causes of deaths stayed more consistent although they are more difficult to prevent, such as a heart attack for example.

CR    In terms of hanging and reduction in numbers, a lot of custody suites have been upgraded, is that a major factor?
MH    We think that is one of the contributing factors, yes.  Other reasons, we believe, are custody officers being more aware of the danger signals, and of course arresting officers being more aware as well.  Drunkenness for example, where the person is taken to hospital for treatment rather than be put in a custody cell.

CR    Has there been other changes?  One I refer to is the safer custody programme.
MH    This only came into being in 2006 so it was difficult to see the impact of that.  I think generally, officers are being better trained, some are being trained more as custody specialists, tightening up on such things as risk assessment and this has helped immensely.
CR    There’s been quite a move in the last four or five years towards private contractors running custody units.  Was that looked at in this report in terms of private contractors and police?
MH    To be frank, it wasn’t something we were able to look at, as we drew our findings from investigation reports that didn’t include those issues, unless of course the investigating officer considered this in a specific case.

CR    Can I ask you; was there a recommendation in this report about how deaths in custody could be further avoided?
MH    Yes, we made ten recommendations in our report that primarily focussed on health care division and risk assessment over the study period, but I think there were certainly large numbers of people who hadn’t been risk assessed when they came into custody.  Overall if somebody who has come into custody and is unprepared to answer risk assessment questions, then that in itself is a risk, and these individuals should be monitored quite carefully.