Police suicide and the National Police Chiefs Council

In April 2019, local crime reporter, Carl Eve wrote a piece entitled “Police forces don’t know how many officers have taken their own lives” which went viral amongst police Twitter. After Carl spent 18 months submitting Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to every police force in England and Wales, to ascertain how many officers and staff lost their lives to suicide, the vast majority of us were deeply surprised to learn that hardly any forces were recording this data.

It was (and remains) a fantastic piece of investigative journalism, and such was the swell of disbelief that police suicides were not recorded, the then chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW), John Apter, took this to chief constable, Martin Hewitt of the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC). It was agreed that this would be corrected and, moving forward, police suicides would be recorded.  

The figures of police suicide we’re currently working on are old – 2017 – and from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) (you can read my Twitter thread on it here), which suggest we lose two officers a month to suicide. And though the evidence is anecdotal, because police suicide is shrouded in secrecy and shame, I can’t help but feel there has been an upsurge in suicides over recent years. Barely a week goes by now where I don’t see a thin blue line image on Twitter, which urges people to “reach out if you’re struggling”.

After being invited to share my thoughts in Carl’s original piece, reading the subsequent public pledge between the Federation and the NPCC, and Carl’s update earlier this year, I have been waiting for movement of this data capture and record but here were are, three years later, with no significant transparency or change.

Last year, I took steps to find out what stage this new suicide recording was at. An assistant chief constable put me in touch with the right people at the NPCC but despite initially promising emails, I was soon met with delays and eventually silence and so, it became my turn to submit an FOI request.

I asked the NPCC the following six questions:

1. Who, in the NPCC, is in charge of the “system” to record these suicides?
2. How and where are police suicides recorded at the NPCC?
3. When did the NPCC start recording police suicides?
4. What is the NPCC strategy to ensure that each force, in England and Wales, are recording in-service deaths / suicides?
5. When and where will the statistics be published?
6. Does the NPCC have a suicide prevention strategy for its members?

Below is a breakdown of their responses:

1. Who, in the NPCC, is in charge of the “system” to record these suicides?

In short, the simple answer is Chief Supt Ian Drummond-Smith of Devon and Cornwall. He is tasked with progressing the proposed national database of “suspected suicides of the police workforce.”

The response suggests that this proposal will be presented to the NPCC in the coming months but that it’s the responsibility of individual chief constables to ensure their recording is consistent and visible to “enable the NPCC to collect national data for the first time.” That point of “collecting data for the first time” is important because they’re about to wildly contradict themselves in their following answers. 

2. How and where are police suicides recorded at the NPCC?

“The NPCC suicide working group have for several years been collecting suicide data as part of a research project”

So, which is it? Have the NPCC been collecting police suicide data or not? 

The NPCC hint that that individual forces will use a recording process similar to the one “recently launched to record assaults data.” This makes sense as it’s painstaking to create and roll out an entirely new system, when you can simply adapt a pre-existing one.

My concern here is that the NPCC expect the chief constables to fund “this solution” yet we all know that funding for general policing issues has plummeted since austerity. More so, we know the budgets for police wellbeing are minimal, at best, so I can’t help but wonder how much money or resources are going to be given to creating “this solution.”

3. When did the NPCC start recording suicides?

I asked this question because I had (perhaps, naively) anticipated that after John Apter and Martin Hewitt had made the very public pledge to record suicides, that this would begin imminently, or certainly things would begin moving in the right direction and we would have transparency around this.

“As stated above, the NPCC suicide working group have for several years been collecting suicide data as part of a research project.” So, again, I ask, where is the data? 

Another confusing aspect to the full response to this question is that the research project appears to lie with the British Transport Police (BTP), specifically the NPCC Suicide Prevention Portfolio owner, ACC Charlie Doyle who lead a pilot on this. I find it bizarre, though not surprising, that we appear to have a suicide prevention lead with ACC Doyle and a suicide database lead in Chief Supt Drummond-Smith. It’s frustrating that every aspect of this data capture is broken down and lead by different forces and senior leaders, risking lack of continuity. 

The pilot that ACC Doyle leads is to capture all suicides in the general community with the ability to categorise their occupation with fields including “police officer, former police officer, police staff and former police staff.” From April 2021, all suicide prevention leads in every force were asked to begin to feed back their suspected police suicides to BTP.  By the NPCC’s  own admission, two forces are still not doing this, which does nothing to reassure me that this data capture is being taken seriously by all chiefs and their forces.  I’ve submitted a FOI request to BTP to attempt to get this pilot project information. 

What’s most confusing about this particular response to my question is that in one breath the NPCC state their “suicide working group have for several years been collecting suicide data as part of a research project” and the next “this is still in the pilot stage”, from April last year. Again, which is it? Does the NPCC have years of supposed data they keep inferring they do, or don’t they?

The most contradictory statement from the NPCC within this question response is that they state that until a “data solution is in place the NPCC are not in a position to collect and present the information”. So, let me ask it again for the people in the back, either the NPCC have been “collecting data for several years” or they haven’t, which is it? They state that a data capture solution should be in place later this year but given they don’t know if they’ve already been collecting data for years (or not), I’m not sold on the notion this will happen as planned.

4. What is the NPCC strategy to ensure that each force, in England and Wales, are recording in-service deaths / suicides?

“This question is answered by the responses to questions 1 and 2”

5. When and where will the statistics be published?

The NPCC don’t currently know when and where the statistics will be published although they believe “there will be a requirement for an annual data return.” Surely an annual return is a logical given? How can we analyse suicide rates and potential trends to improve our suicide prevention offerings as services, if we don’t know the problem, and what is and isn’t working for our workforce? 

And, again, does it not make sense that a report (annually or otherwise) would be disseminated to all services in England and Wales to ensure proper data capture, recording and best practice, even if they are not prepared to publish such data publicly?

6. Does the NPCC have a suicide prevention strategy for its members?

They responded that they “did not hold the information” initially but what I was asking here was if the NPCC, as its own organisation with officers, staff and employees, have an individual suicide prevention strategy. This was in light of the tragic death of chief constable Simon Cole, as I was curious if there were a strategy in place for deputy, assistant and chief constables, given they fall outside of the Federation’s and Superintendents Association’s purview.

The NPCC’s answer appeared to interpret my question differently, and spoke of the national suicide prevention strategy published by the National Police Wellbeing Service in February, which you can read here. 

In their response, the NPCC confirmed they had “completed a ‘suicide consensus statement,’ accompanied by the next steps of “commitment to a) deliver a postvention toolkit and b) resolve the data recording proposal.” “Postvention,” for those who don’t know, refers to what to do after a suicide or in-service death has occurred.  This is in an attempt, amongst other things, to prevent or minimise suicide contagion and clusters (one suicide leading to several others), something Police Scotland sadly experienced in 2019. 

I went back to the NPCC for clarification on the suicide prevention strategy and their answer floored me.

Their response was that “the NPCC is not a law enforcement agency and is hosted by the Metropolitan Police Service, and will therefore use their HR and finance policies and teams etc.” 

Forgive me, but with a title of “National Police Chiefs Council”, I would have naively believed they were a governing body, akin to an oversight committee. I did not expect them to be “hosted” by the Met, and therefore merely an extension of one particular police service and not an organisation in their own right. Surely this brings about questions of propriety and impartiality, if the NPCC has cause to issue statements and actions against the Met, or perversely, fail to do so? 

You can read the FOI request and NPCC response in full, below.

Whilst I wholly commend the NPCC for going above and beyond in all their responses to my questions, answering in far more detail that my initial questions would elicit, especially when I went back for clarification, I am left deeply confused by their contradictions and lack of apparent sense of urgency of the issue at hand.

I’m disheartened that the above information had to be elicited through a FOI request, three years after the very public pledge, and not because the NPCC have been forthcoming and transparent in their process of recording police suicides up to this point.

And though I have no doubt that there will be many people reading this, arguing I’m attacking the NPCC, all I’m asking for is accountability and transparency in the vital work around safeguarding the lives of our officers and staff. I’ve written and tweeted many times that the NPCC comms aren’t good enough, especially on internal matters, and I have yet to see a change in their communication strategy that would suggest otherwise. 

The optimist in me will take the NPCC at their word and believe we will begin to see some internal results to the above action in the coming months. The cynic in me? I can’t help but feel that if the NPCC don’t count suicides, they don’t have to accept they have a problem that requires demonstrable action.

I’ll leave you to ask yourself which one you are.

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