The system of accountability for racism and racial discrimination in deaths of Black people following police contact is not fit for purpose. The police watchdog, inquests and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have historically failed – and continue to fail – to scrutinise the role that racial stereotyping might have played in these deaths, especially where excessive force is used. The result is that officers are not held accountable, there is no systemic learning and change, and more deaths of Black people occur in similar circumstances.

INQUEST’s latest report, I can’t breathe: race, death & British policing (February 2023), examines the scale of racial disproportionality in deaths following police contact and highlights Black bereaved families’ experiences of raising the issue of race. The report also draws on the expert insight of leading human rights lawyers, considering why the post-death investigation processes are failing bereaved families and the public, and allowing preventable deaths to continue and the issue of racism to go unchallenged. As part of the research, INQUEST identified longstanding evidence of racial disproportionality in deaths. Most starkly, official data never before made public revealed that Black people are seven times more likely to die than White people following the use of restraint in police custody or following contact.

Despite this, none of the accountability processes effectively and substantially consider the role racism might have played. Through freedom of information requests, INQUEST found that, in cases involving the death of a Black person where police force was used between 2015 and 2021, not a single officer has been found to have a case to answer by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) for misconduct or gross misconduct in respect of racial discrimination. Nor have there been criminal charges or any serious sanctions in relation to these cases. This is in contrast to the evidence from the cases and bereaved families featured in the report.

Lawyers reported that the police themselves are resistant to facing up to the reality of institutional racism. Many lawyers believed that the IOPC lacks the political will to establish a framework, based on the current statute, that would deal with this persistent issue.

The lawyers reported that the police are often uncooperative when questioned and deny their actions were influenced by racism. In 2020, the police Standards of Professional Behaviour were changed to clarify that failure to cooperate with investigations and inquiries could constitute misconduct.1See para 7.4 (page 3) of the explanatory memorandum to the Police (Conduct) Regulations 2020 SI No 4. The police watchdog could invoke this ‘duty of cooperation’ to force officers to comply with investigations – but has never done so.

The lawyers also suggested that the guidance from the IOPC for its investigators in such cases, where it can be shown that there is sufficient evidence of unlawful discrimination, should be more explicit to put the onus on the police to offer reasons other than racism to explain their actions.

Significantly, neither the IOPC’s guidance on how to determine whether discrimination has taken place, nor the way it is interpreted in practice, are in line with provisions in the Equality Act 2010. If the Act were fully applied in this way by the IOPC, the refusal by officers to give a non-discriminatory explanation in cases involving the death of Black people after police contact – offering little beyond ‘no comment’ to the IOPC – should prompt the watchdog to find that there was a case to answer for misconduct on the grounds of race. Were the burden of proof to shift to the police, then the IOPC guidance and practice would be legally consistent and on a par with that used in the civil courts. This would represent a step change in what happens at present.

More broadly, INQUEST found that the inquest process is hindered by a lack of coronial racial awareness and a chronic inability to see racism being pertinent to the situation in which a Black person has died in police custody, despite a wealth of evidence to suggest it is. The idea that racism exists beyond explicit bigotry is not accounted for in the current bureaucratic and political structures. These are failing to recognise that racism exists in a much deeper way in society that has roots in its power structures. While the deaths of Black men at the hands of police are seen by the investigatory authorities as isolated, individual incidents, Black people will continue to die disproportionately.

In the short term, we need better investigation and oversight of deaths to address racism in policing and public services and respond to repeated state failures. The post-death legal processes must ensure bereaved families can access truth, justice and accountability, as well as inform structural change to prevent future deaths.

In the long term, we must situate these deaths within their broader social and political context. We must work towards a more just society and divert resources away from policing and the criminal justice system, and towards community, welfare, health, housing, education, youth services and social care.