Investigates deaths in custodyOVER 480 PEOPLE died in police custody or operations across 13 EU countries – including Ireland – over a period of three years.
During the years 2020 to 2022, 72 people died in custody or during a garda operation.
The exact cause of death is not detailed in the stats released by the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (Gsoc) but in recent years most deaths occurred following Garda contact, after release from custody or in custody.
This includes George Nkencho, fatally shot dead in his front garden by armed gardaí in 2020. The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) has since decided not to prosecute the garda who shot him, a decision that is being challenged by Nkencho’s family.
And Shane Burke, found dead after a 50-minute journey in a garda van in 2022, hours after he had discharged himself out of an addiction treatment service. His family called for increased welfare checks on those detained in Garda vehicles following his inquest.
Across the 13 countries, the figures are stark. At least 488 people died in police custody or in police operations in the three years 2020 to 2022.
This data was compiled by Spanish outlet Civio in collaboration with the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNET). The Journal Investigates was the Irish partner on this investigation.
Ireland featured among the countries with the highest number of people per population who died in police custody or operations between 2020 and 2022. But, it should be noted, Irish authorities record all deaths in such circumstances, unlike some member states who have incomplete or no data on the issue.
For example, in Germany, the federal government still only collects figures on police-related shooting deaths, as does Sweden.
France has the highest absolute figures – 107 deaths. It is followed by Ireland (72), Spain (66) and Germany (60).
“When making comparisons with other jurisdictions, it is important to bear in mind how these incidents are defined and categorised, which can vary considerably,” a Gsoc spokesperson said when asked about the high number of cases.
Gsoc is the independent authority invested with the statutory authority to investigate all of these incidents.
Based on population, Ireland is the country with by far the most deaths per capita: 1.37 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 0.14 in Spain or 0.06 in Portugal.
It is not possible to compare like-for-like data across the member states, which makes any cross-European comparison difficult, according to professor Yvonne Daly of DCU’s School of Law and Government.
However, she added that, across jurisdictions, “it is important that we have a proper sense of these numbers” and the context of any deaths which occurred. This is because if “there are areas where the police need to be particularly careful, they should be alerted”.
A Garda spokesperson told us that “any matter that appears to indicate that the conduct of a member of [An] Garda Síochána may have resulted in the death of a person” in Ireland is referred to Gsoc.
Data on such deaths is detailed in Gsoc’s annual reports. This information can also be provided through parliamentary questions, most recently in March when TD Paul Murphy requested updated information.
Latest figures show that 264 people who died in these circumstances were referred to Gsoc from when it was created in 2007 up to 2023.
“Every fatal incident occurring while in Garda custody, no matter the cause of death, is treated with the utmost seriousness and is properly investigated,” a spokesperson for the Department of Justice (DOJ) told The Journal Investigates.
“It is important, both for the loved ones of those who have passed away and for An Garda Síochána, to understand how these events occurred.”
They added that human rights are at the core of the work of the gardaí, “the right to life being the most fundamental”.
The actual number of deaths is higher than reported by our investigation in many of the other EU countries, as the data provided by several is incomplete.
The UN recommends that countries provide public information on all police-related deaths.
Portugal began publishing theirs in 1997, Denmark in 2012, and it took until 2018 for France to start.
Last year, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights requested data from all states on deaths in custody, from the moment of arrest, while in police custody and in prison.
In its response, the Council of Europe confirmed the lack of data in many member states. It also pointed out that there is “no common definition nor a detailed methodology” in the European region as to what constitutes a death in custody or how one should be investigated.
Though Ireland provides the actual overall number of people who died in police custody or operation, as well as, in more recent years, a breakdown which includes certain details on the circumstances of death, many specifics are not given.
In other jurisdictions, the investigation team could obtain the nationality of those who died, whether they had a mental illness and if the deceased was intoxicated from drugs or alcohol.
The Journal Investigates asked Gsoc for such details for each of the 17 deaths in Ireland in 2022 but a spokesperson said:
“As investigatory and disciplinary proceedings are ongoing in many of these cases, it is not possible to provide further information on the cases as per your request.”
These details were also not given by Gsoc for the 21 deaths in 2020 or the 34 deaths in 2021. The DOJ said that “the Coroners Service is the independent body established with the statutory responsibility to determine the cause of a death”.
Gsoc did include details on the circumstances of death in their recent annual reports as well as in press responses to The Journal Investigates.
From 2020 to 2023, most people were recorded as dying following Garda contact (27), following release from custody (15) or in custody (14).
Car chases and crashes also featured. 14 referrals to Gsoc during this time were in relation to road traffic incidents that involved Garda pursuit while another five involved a road traffic collision.
A Gsoc report from 2022 detailed a number of deaths which involved alcohol use.
One man, “found unresponsive in his cell”, was “intoxicated at the time of arrest”. Another man died in hospital from “skull fractures and extensive internal bleeding in his head”. He was arrested and spent a number of hours in custody after he became aggressive on the way to hospital after a fall.
Even if these statistics are not released publicly, it is important that they are being collated and analysed so that patterns can be detected, said Daly, who edited the recently published book ‘Police Custody in Ireland‘.
“Policing is a difficult job and police encounter people at crisis moments in their lives… We need to give them all the resources that they need to be able to deal with that appropriately.
“If they don’t have all the resources and it leads to adverse outcomes… as a State, I think there’s an obligation to get a greater sense of why that’s happening and what we can then do to avoid it.”
The Gsoc spokesperson told us that systemic recommendations are made to the Garda Commissioner following investigations which find “systemic issues of policy and practice that, if left uncorrected, can leave unresolved risk”.
In 2022, these included recommendations on pursuit of vehicles, monitoring of health and wellbeing in custody, installation of defibrillators, seeking medical opinion in relation to comatosed or intoxicated prisoners and self-harm risk assessments.
When such recommendations are made, the DOJ then “considers the recommendations and what can be done to support” the gardaí in implementing them, a department spokesperson said.
Ireland is also currently in the process of ratifying the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT). It is the last in the EU to do so, after signing it in 2007 – a delay the director of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) Deirdre Malone called “unacceptable” in June.
To ratify it, the State must enact the Inspection of Places of Detention Bill aimed at strengthening inspection and monitoring of places of detention, including Garda stations.
“Enactment is something that is being very actively worked on and the Minister expects the text of the Bill to be finalised by the end of the year”, the DOJ told us.
Hungary provides information on the nationality of the deceased in all cases, and Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Spain in some of the cases.
Together they provided nationality data for 55 deaths reported between 2020 and 2022. Half were foreigners.
“Details around ethnicity and age of people who are being detained is not being collected by the gardaí,” but is in Northern Ireland, England and Wales said criminal law expert Daly. “It really should be” as it helps authorities understand who is being arrested and “with future planning”.
Legislation is needed to allow gardaí to collect ethnic indicators, according to the Policing Authority in recent years, after seeking legal advice on it.
Having a mental illness is also an important factor. Most of the public administrations the investigation team contacted did not provide specific information on this either.
Denmark, Spain, France and Germany confirmed that the deceased had a mental illness or was in a “state of agitation” in 43 cases.
Newer Dutch reports do not provide this data, but an earlier report on deaths between 2016 and 2020 does. There is data on 40 of the 50 people who died in that period, and of those, 28 (70%) had a mental illness.
The data collected by Controle Alt Delete is also shocking. Of the 105 deaths they monitored since 2015, around 70% were people who had some form of mental illness.
Despite this, Schalkwijk said the Dutch police system “have not changed anything, even though they know that many of the people who die at the hands of the police [had a] mental illness”.
In Ireland, the family of George Nkencho said that he had mental health issues for several months before his death.
The 27-year-old suffered fatal gunshot wounds during a stand-off involving members of the Garda Armed Support Unit outside his family home in Clonee, Co Dublin in December 2020. He was armed with a kitchen knife at the time.
This happened shortly after Nkencho was involved in an incident at a local Eurospar, where he assaulted a shop assistant. He was pronounced dead in hospital a short time later. Post-mortem results showed he died as a result of multiple gunshot wounds to the torso.
Nkencho’s family has requested a review of the decision by the DPP earlier this year not to prosecute the garda involved. His inquest has been adjourned until next April to accommodate this.
More than one in three deaths between 2020 and 2022 were from gunshot wounds, in the countries that provided information to the investigation team on causes of these deaths.
‘Discharge of a Garda firearm’ was listed as the cause of one death in Ireland during this period, according to Gsoc data provided to The Journal Investigates.
Since last year the gardaí have also begun to release monthly statistics on use of force, as well as the number of people injured when force is used.
The latest report shows that firearms were used three times, ‘less lethal’ firearms eight times and tasers 17 times from January to July this year.
During that time, 172 civilians and 166 gardaí were injured during ‘use of force’ incidents. No detail is given in these reports on whether any incidents resulted in someone’s death.
Across the EU, our investigation found that from 2020 to 2022 at least 105 people died from gunshot wounds. 41 were in France and 27 in Germany.
The number of deaths caused by police shootings in France began to rise in 2017, according to Basta!. That year, then-president François Hollande’s government reformed the Public Security Law, loosening the limits on when officers could use their firearms.
Supposedly non-lethal weapons, such as tasers, are also responsible for deaths. The investigation team found that these are sometimes used following protocols that contradict the manufacturer’s recommendations, such as using them against people in a state of agitation.
Between 2020 and 2022, Civio, who led this investigation identified at least eight cases of deaths after police use of tasers: three in the Netherlands, one in France and four in Germany, although in three of the German cases the official reports state that the cause of death was not related.
A spokesperson for the gardaí told us: “No person has ever died during incidents when tasers were used by Gardaí in Ireland.”
The second highest cause of death among the countries examined was ‘natural’, with this being attributed to 55 people who died between 2020 and 2022.
It is a catch-all used mainly by Spain, which reports 27 natural deaths, in most cases without further data on the context. This category is not used in Ireland.
Our investigation found that in many deaths labelled as ‘natural’, the deceased showed a state of drug and alcohol intoxication.
In Ireland, being drunk in a public space is a criminal offence. Gsoc’s data does not include information on whether the deceased person was drunk, but it has made a number of recommendations aimed at preventing deaths in custody related to this issue.
In France, it is also common for police to take intoxicated people to spend the night in police cells. Between 2020 and 2022, at least 19 people who were intoxicated or had taken drugs died in French police cells due to health problems.
Although the Police Department of the Finnish Ministry of the Interior did not provide data by year, it confirmed that “alcohol and drug use was at least a contributory factor in deaths in more than half of the cases” between 2013 and 2023.
“Police traditionally take drunk people to the police station” even when the person is calm and does not cause any disturbance to public order or security, the Ministry said, and claimed it is trying to get police officers to abandon this practice. The spokesperson added:
Instead of police services, they would need health monitoring.
Finnish police have implemented measures to prevent such deaths, such as more training for officers, more surveillance cameras and the use of technology to monitor the vital functions of detainees.
Between 2020 and 2022, the investigation team identified at least 43 people who died by suicide in police custody. Most of these deaths were in Spain, France and Denmark. This information is also not available in Ireland.
Across the EU, the extent of such deaths is not known as the data is incomplete or entirely absent in several member states.
For example, in Spain no administration centralises the cases occurring in town or city police forces. There, the Ministry of the Interior only records deaths involving the National Police and the Civil Guard.
Speaking of his native Spain, Jorge del Cura said that “the most serious thing is that nobody cares that these people die”.
Del Cura is a Spanish activist who has been monitoring these deaths for decades and who in 2019 received the National Human Rights Award. He added that regions of Spain have “no interest in keeping a register either”.
Basta!, a French independent media outlet, started collecting information on deaths in police custody and operations in 2014, years before official data was published. Journalist Ivan du Roy of the outlet said:
It’s still a kind of taboo in France to talk about this, because as soon as you accuse the police, you’re against the police.
Controle Alt Delete, a civil society organisation in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, has been investigating the issue since 2016. “We have forced the government to report all cases of police-related deaths,” said Jair Schalkwijk, a lawyer and co-founder of the organisation. Previously, only reports on the use of weapons by officers and deaths that resulted were reported.
In neighbouring Germany, the federal government still only collects figures on police shooting deaths, as does Sweden.
Since 2010, the European Court of Human Rights has condemned EU countries 236 times for failing to investigate possible cases of torture or mistreatment and a further 157 times for failing to investigate deaths, both in contact with the police and in other contexts.
Romania, which refused to provide data on police-related deaths to our investigation, has 79 convictions for failing to investigate possible cases of mistreatment and torture, and a further 60 for deaths, including those of five people killed in an anti-government demonstration.
Bulgaria and Italy, which also refused to provide data for our investigation, have 57 and 33 convictions respectively for violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.
In most cases of death across the EU countries investigated, States also failed to provide data on the consequences – criminal or otherwise – for the police officers involved.
Outcomes of Gsoc investigations are broken down in annual reports. In 2023, 62 investigations completed that referred because the conduct of a garda may have resulted in the serious injury or death of a person. Most (37) concluded that further investigation was “not necessary or reasonably practical”.
Five had a criminal investigation undertaken and were referred to the DPP, of which four were subsequently prosecuted.
Recommendations that stem from such investigations in Ireland and other countries are not only important for police forces to improve, but “for society’s belief in the legitimacy of their police”, DCU’s Daly said.
She added that given there may be limitations to prevent identifying people in some cases, it is vital “that nothing is being hidden from the public” and information is made available if at all possible.
This includes being told what happened, how it was investigated and what changes in processes or resources were made as a result.
“Without that type of transparency, it just leaves room for concerns to fester.”
This investigation was led by Spanish outlet Civio alongside other members of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNET), including The Journal Investigates.
Reporter & Editor (The Journal Investigates, Ireland): Maria Delaney • Reporter (Civio, Spain): Ter García • Editor (The Journal, Ireland): Sinéad O’Carroll • Main Image Design: Lorcan O’Reilly • Social Media: Sadbh Cox • Graphics: Maria Delaney (Ireland), Adrián Maqueda & Carmen Torrecillas (Civio, Spain)
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