“I screamed ‘My son is sick, he needs help. They did not listen, they came to kill,” says Momtaz Al Madani. On 30 May 2018, Momtaz’s son Yazan Al Madani, 27, suffered a psychotic break and went screaming out on the balcony of his home in Rotterdam, holding a knife. His father called the police and shortly afterwards several officers arrived armed with guns, shields, tasers and dogs.
First, the police released their dogs on Yazan, then they tased him twice and shot him. Yazan died shortly afterwards. A year later, the Dutch Public Prosecutor’s Office decided not to prosecute the officers involved on the grounds that they acted in self-defense. Since 2022, the European Court of Human Rights has been investigating the death of Yazan Al Madani.
Between 2020 and 2022, at least 487 people died in custody or in police operations in the 13 EU countries that publish data or provided it to us.
France has the highest absolute figures: between 2020 and 2022 it counted 107 deaths in custody or in police operations. It is followed by Ireland, Spain and Germany, with 71, 66 and 60 deaths respectively. However, based on population, Ireland is the country with by far the most deaths per capita: 1.34 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in that time period, compared to 0.14 in Spain or 0.06 in Portugal. The actual number of deaths is higher, as the data provided by several countries is incomplete.
“When making comparisons with other jurisdictions, it is important to bear in mind how these incidents are defined and categorised, which can vary considerably,” writes the national police’s Ombudsman Commission in Ireland.
Interesting article?
It was made possible by Voxeurop’s community. High-quality reporting and translation comes at a cost. To continue producing independent journalism, we need your support.
Subscribe or Donate
The UN recommended in 1991 that countries provide public information on all police-related deaths. Portugal began publishing theirs in 1997, Denmark in 2012, and France only in 2018. The Netherlands only reports cases investigated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Ireland only reports cases investigated by the Ombudsman and Sweden’s Agency of Forensic Medicine reports deaths it attributes to any police action and its police report deaths due to police shootings. Finally, Slovenia’s police publish the number of deaths caused by police action. The other EU countries do not regularly report this information.
In 2023, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights requested data from all countries for deaths in custody, from arrest to remand in custody and imprisonment. In its response, the Council of Europe confirms the lack of data and points out that there is not even a common definition and methodology across the Union as to what constitutes a death in custody and how it should be investigated.
The Minnesota Protocol is a guide promoted by the United Nations for the investigation of deaths for which the State, its dependent bodies or agents may be responsible, by action or omission. It should be applied in situations in which the deceased was in police custody or where the death may have been the result of police action. Under the Minnesota Protocol the state must investigate any death occurring in suspicious circumstances and identify systemic failures that led to the death and measures to prevent future cases. It also mandates that investigations into deaths involving members of law enforcement agencies be conducted without influence from institutional hierarchies and that the process and findings of these investigations be subject to public scrutiny. No EU country fully complies with these recommendations.
“‘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,” says journalist Ivan du Roy, of Basta!, a French independent media outlet, which became the first to collect information on deaths in custody and in police operations in 2014, years before the General Inspectorate of the National Police began publishing information in 2018.
Controle Alt Delete, a civil society organisation in the Netherlands, has been investigating cases of deaths in custody or police actions since 2016. “We started after we realised in 2015 that the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the police were not publishing all the data,” says Jair Schalkwijk, a lawyer and co-founder of the organisation. He points out that, previously, the Public Prosecutor’s Office only published reports on the use of weapons by officers and the number of times they ended in death. “We have forced the government to report all cases of police-related deaths,” Schalkwijk adds. In neighbouring Germany, the federal government still only collects figures on fatal shootings by the police, as is the case in Sweden.
Migrants and people with mental illness, the main victims
Of the 13 countries that have provided data on deaths in contact with the police between 2020 and 2022, 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 of the 487 deaths reported in those three years. Half were foreigners.
Mathieu Rigouste, is an independent French sociologist: he links this concentration of deaths among migrant populations to the colonial history of countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain and France. “Police crimes are concentrated on non-white proletarians,” Rigouste says. Adama Traoré, born in France to Malian parents, is a case in point: in 2016, police arrested Traoré in Beaumont-sur-Oise, outside Paris, and he died in police custody. “Traoré was a black proletarian from a suburban neighbourhood who was chased by the police, captured and strangled. He was criminalised first by the police and then by the media and politicians,” Rigouste says.
Suffering from a mental illness also plays a major role. Most of the public administrations we contacted did not provide specific information on this either. Only Denmark, Spain, France and Germany confirmed that the deceased had mental health problems or was in a “state of agitation” in 43 cases.
The most current Dutch reports do not provide data on whether the deceased suffered from mental health problems, but an earlier report commissioned by the Dutch government 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 suffered from mental illness. The data collected by Controle Alt Delete is even more shocking. Of the 105 deaths they have monitored since 2015, around 70% were people suffering from some form of mental illness.
Yazan Al Madani was one of the people who died in the Netherlands in 2018. He had arrived in the country a year earlier from Syria as a refugee. However, Yazan’s arrival in the country was very difficult. For the first eight months he had no access to psychiatric treatment, and then the Dutch administration rejected his request for the medicines he needed for housing and for reunification with his wife, who is also Syrian. “He was left on the street with nothing: no money, no wife, no house, no medical treatment… nothing,” says his father, who also came to the Netherlands as a refugee. “They killed him a thousand times before they killed him for real.”
In September 2024, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities alerted the Netherlands and Belgium to the high number of people with disabilities who had died under the responsibility of their law enforcement agencies and recommended that the countries improve their law enforcement training.
Gunshot wounds, the leading cause of death
Gunshot wounds by officers are the leading cause of deaths in custody or in police interventions. In the countries that have provided information on causes of these deaths, more than one in three deaths between 2020 and 2022 were from gunshot wounds. At least 98 people died. 41 were in France and 27 in Germany.
According to Basta!, the number of deaths caused by police shootings in France began to rise in 2017. That year, a reform of the Public Security Law, loosened the limits on when officers could use their firearms.
Police shooting deaths are not the only ones. The police sometimes kill people using supposedly non-lethal weaponry, such as tasers, which they sometimes use following protocols that contradict the manufacturer’s recommendations, such as using them against people in a state of agitation.
Between 2020 and 2022, we have identified at least eight cases of death involving the use of tasers, four in Germany, three in the Netherlands and one in France, and in five of these cases the person was mentally ill or agitated. In addition to these, at least one more person died due to police violence during the same period. Catalan autonomous police the Mossos d’Esquadra killed Badalona resident Antonio with six shocks from a taser. The Catalan Department of the Interior reported that a weapon was used in this police action, but did not specify that it was a taser gun, meaning that there may be other such cases hidden in the official figures.
The second most repeated official cause of death in our investigation is “natural,” with 55 people dying 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. In 2018, Stephan Lache also died “natural death” in police custody in Spain. according to the Ministry of the Interior. Spanish National Police officers arrested Lache at 4am and took him to a Madrid police station. The police report states that he had an aggressive attitude and self-harmed, so the police called the emergency medical service. The images recorded by the police station’s cameras show how three medical staff and two police officers grab him to give him an injection. The next day, the police officers found him dead in his cell.
Arrested for drunkenness, died in custody
In many other deaths labeled as “natural,” the deceased showed a state of drug and alcohol intoxication.
In Ireland, being drunk in a public space is a criminal offense. The Irish Ombudsman’s data on deaths in custody or in police actions does not include information on whether the deceased persons were drunk, but in 2022 the Irish Ombudsman made a number of recommendations aimed at preventing deaths in custody related to this issue, which are not binding.
Although the Finnish Ministry of the Interior has not provided data by year, it confirmed to Civio that 16 of the deaths that have taken place between 2013 and 2023 were caused by alcohol and drug intoxication. “Alcohol and drug use was at least a contributory factor in deaths in more than half of the cases,” writes the Police Department of the Finnish Ministry of the Interior, which adds that the 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 is trying to get police officers to abandon this practice, it states: “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, we have identified at least 43 people who committed suicide in police custody. Most of these deaths were in Spain, France and Denmark, but in other countries, with fewer deaths in contact with the police, and fewer people, suicides account for almost all deaths in police custody. Latvia reported five deaths in police custody between 2020 and 2022, and two more in 2023, all by hanging. Hungary reported six deaths, four of them also by hanging. In Germany, no state has reported cases of suicide, but at least one of them, Bavaria, points out that such deaths are not included in the reports if they have not been preceded by coercive measures by officers.
Insufficient research
Despite the UN’s recommendation that the process of investigating security force-related deaths should be subject to public scrutiny, in most cases information on these investigations is scarce. Austria states that it has been limited to autopsies. “In all cases, a medical examination was carried out and a subsequent report was made to the public prosecutor. Since no signs of third-party guilt were found in any of the cases, the public prosecutor did not initiate any investigative measures,” the Austrian Interior Ministry states.
The Netherlands Public Prosecutor’s Office’s annual report on police-related deaths includes only cases that have been investigated. However, every year there are a couple of cases that do not see justice, Controle Alt Delete reports.
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, public administrations have also failed to provide data on criminal or employment consequences for the police officers involved. They did provide such data for 97 of the 487 cases registered between 2020 and 2022. Of these, the only case in which the administration has confirmed the imprisonment of the officers involved took place in the Basque Country in Spain. In 84 cases investigated, the officers involved did not suffer any consequences. The investigation is still ongoing in three cases.
The data published by the Netherlands Public Prosecutor’s Office does not include information on the conclusions of the investigations, but Controle Alt Delete requested details on each case. “We know that, from 2016 until now, in 6% of the cases, the officers involved have been prosecuted, usually in road traffic deaths,” Schalkwijk says. In one of these cases, the officers were punished with 200 and 240 hours of community service respectively, and in another case the officer was acquitted.
Francesca Barca (Voxeurop) and Maria Delaney (Noteworthy) have contributed to this article.
Methodology
For this investigation Civio and other EDJNET members requested from all EU countries, based on national transparency laws and through government press offices, data on cases of people who have died in police custody (whether in police stations, detention centers for foreigners or other establishments run by police forces) and in police actions between 2010 and 2022, including information on the date, age, nationality and gender of the deceased, the place where the person died, the reason for detention, the cause of death, whether weapons were involved and what type, whether the death was the subject of a judicial investigation, the findings of this investigation and any employment or criminal proceedings against the officers involved. We received responses as follows:
Spain. We made this request to:
-The Ministry of the Interior, in relation to the Civil Guard and the National Police: The information submitted on deaths in police actions covers the years 2015 to 2022, with data on the year, the place -public road, home or other- and cause of death -natural, accidental or suicide. We have also used the information provided by the Ministry to the parliamentary question asked by Bildu MP Jon Iñarritu, published by La Marea, which includes context on each death. On deaths in police custody, the information provided includes the year, cause of death -natural, accidental or suicide- and the facility where the death took place -ACUDE, municipal morgue, court premises, police premises other than ACUDE, home, CIE, hospital, transfer and penitentiary centre. They also sent information on deaths of prisoners.
Through the press office, we asked the Ministry of the Interior if they had data on deaths related to local police forces, but the ministry confirmed that they do not collect this data.
-Department of Security of the Basque Government, in relation to the Ertzaintza. The reply includes all the information requested.
-Department of the Interior of Catalonia. The information provided includes age, gender, nationality, whether there was an investigation, but not the conclusion of the investigation or the weapons involved.
Germany. Kira Schacht of Deutsche Welle adapted our request and sent it to the 16 states that make up the country. They responded as follows:
-Berlin: figures for deaths in police custody and in police actions from 2010 to 2022, without further information, and a specific report on deaths in 2022 published in response to a parliamentary question.
-Baden-Württemberg: data on deaths in police operations, distinguishing whether by firearm or other unspecified causes, and in custody between 2018 and 2022, including data on nationality and age.
-Bavaria: deaths in custody and in police actions between 2013 and 2022, with information on nationality, gender, age and cause of death. The Bavarian Ministry of the Interior notes that it does not include cases of suicide or other deaths occurring during arrest or custody without prior coercive measures.
-Brandenburg: data on firearm deaths by officers between 2010 and 2022, including in some cases age and nationality.
-Bremen: deaths in police operations or in custody from 2014 to 2022, with information on nationality and age. They do not specify cause of death but note that there were no deaths by firearms.
-Hamburg: The Department of the Interior submits three reports made on the basis of parliamentary questions on deaths between 1990 and 2019, 2020 to 2022, and 2023.
-Hesse: The State Police Office provided only data on deaths in police operations between 2010 and 2022 in which police action was the direct cause of death, with information on whether a firearm, taser or pepper spray was used.
-Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: the Ministry of the Interior issued a press release, no longer available on the web, on the only death they claim to have caused, stating nationality and findings of the investigation.
-Lower Saxony: The Ministry of Justice stated that no data is collected on deaths in police custody. On deaths in police custody, it reported five cases submitted by the Ministry of the Interior, including information on the cause of death. It included data on deaths in police custody from a parliamentary report on the use of tasers.
-North Rhine-Westphalia: The administration provided no data . Data on deaths in police operations since 2015 are from a parliamentary report.
-Rhineland-Palatinate: this state reported deaths in police operations from 2015 to 2022, with all the information requested. They sent a table with ten cases and add one more case due to a traffic accident. They added that the Ministry of Family, Women, Culture and Integration states that there have been no deaths in detention centers for foreigners.
-Saarland: this state sent deaths in police interventions and in custody between 2010 and 2022 with a brief account of the events, age of the deceased and conclusions of the investigation.
-Saxony-Anhalt: The Ministry of the Interior provided a report on deaths caused by the use of firearms in police interventions from 2000 to July 2020, noting that there were no more deaths caused by firearms until the end of 2022 and adding another death in 2022 in which no firearm was used. It provided another report on deaths in police custody between 1995 and May 2018.
-Schleswig-Holstein: the State Police Office provided data on deaths in police interventions from 2016 to 2022, with nationality, age, gender, context in which it happened, weapon involved. It stated that it investigated all cases.
We included data from the annual reports on use of firearms carried out by the German Police University on behalf of the Standing Conference of Ministers of the Interior and Senators of the Federal States (IMK). The reports are published by CILIP, a publication of the Institut für Bürgerrechte & öffentliche Sicherheit, an institution affiliated with the Faculty of Law of the Humboldt University of Berlin. We also included cases of death by taser collected by CILIP for which an official communication is available.
Czech Republic. Daniel Kotecký of EDJNet partner Denik Referendum adapted our request and sent it to the Police Presidency, which provides the information except for the conclusions of the investigations.
Ireland. Maria Delaney, of EDJNet partners Noteworthy and The Journal adapted our request and sent it to the Irish Police. They refused to provide the information but did refer to the Ministry of Justice’s response, with data from the ombudsman to a parliamentary question. We supplemented that with data from the Ombudsman’s annual reports, which provide the total number of deaths and the context, such as in custody, death after contact with officers, road traffic accidents, during arrest, after being in custody and others, for the years 2021 and 2022, and only the total number of deaths for the other years.
Hungary. Szabó Krisztián of EDJNet parter Atlatszo adapted our request and sent it to Hungarian authorities. The reply includes deaths in police interventions from 2015 to 2022 and in custody since 2013, including all requested information except the conclusions of the investigation, which is only provided in cases of police actions and one case of deaths in custody.
Sweden. Total number of deaths per year in police interventions are from the Swedish Forensic Medicine Agency’s statistics from 2019 to 2023 and statistics on police shooting deaths from 1994 to 2023 are those published by the Swedish Police.
Netherlands. Data are from the annual reports of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, including data on police-related fatalities in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Data for the years 2016 to 2020 are from the study Fatal Police Incidents. Patterns of fatal incidents in the context of policing, commissioned by the Dutch government. We also included data from the police fatality register of Controle Alt Delete, a civil society organisation, including official communications.
Austria. Civio sent our request to the Ministry of the Interior. The reply includes the total number of deaths per year in custody and in police interventions between 2014 and 2023, whether they were investigated and, in the case of deaths in police custody, a brief account of the events, nationality and age of the deceased.
Finland. Civio sent our request to the Ministry of the Interior. The reply includes deaths in police custody since 2010 and by the Public Prosecutor’s Office since 2017, which also includes deaths in police custody.
Denmark. Civio sent our request to the Police and Public Prosecutor’s Office. The reply confirms the number of deaths per year from 2012 to 2023 in custody and in police actions. This includes data from the annual reports of the Danish Police Appeals Authority, in existence since 2012, in which there are figures for deaths in contact with the police and a brief summary of the facts in some cases.
Latvia. Civio sent our request to the Ministry of the Interior. The reply provided data on deaths in custody between 2020 and 2023, with information on age and gender. and stated that since 2015 there have been no investigations into cases of deaths due to police violence.
France. EDJNet partner Voxeurop and Civio requested data from the Police and the Ministry of the Interior, without response. The data included are from the reports of the Inspection générale de la police nationale (IGPN), which since 2018 include data on police-related deaths. In 2018 only the total number of fatalities is included, in 2019 they provide information on weapons involved, and since 2020 the reports include brief summaries of the context of each death. Francesca Barca of Voxeurop conducted the interviews with Mathieu Rigouste and Ivan du Roy.
Portugal: data are from the annual reports of the Inspeção-Geral da Administração Interna, accessed with the collaboration of Pedro Miguel Santos of EDJNet parter Divergente and the Fumaça project. The data include the total number of deaths per year, without specifying context, and how many of these were by firearm. It also indicates the police force involved, but without specifying the cause of death, so we have not included this information. The reports do not include cases related to the Judicial Police.
Slovenia: data are from national police annual reports [Policija](https://www.policija.si/o-slovenski-policiji/statistika). Taja Topolovec of EDJNet partner Pod črto adapted our request and sent it Slovenian authorities. The government’s reply listed five deaths not due to police actions between 2018 and 2023, but we have not included them because the reply did not specify the years of each death.
We requested information from the following countries, which have refused to provide the data:
Slovakia. The administration refused to reply to the request for information made by Tomáš Hrivňák, of EDJNet partner DennÍk N on the grounds that it did not have this information.
Italy. The Ministry of the Interior referred the request made by Gianluca De Feo, of EDJNet partner OBC Transeuropa, to three departments, one of which refused to provide the information on the grounds that it involves processing a large amount of data, exceeding the provisions of the Italian transparency law.
Romania: The General Police Inspectorate refused to provide the information requested by Civio on the grounds that the transparency law does not oblige them to process the information they have in order to provide “statistics on demand”.
Estonia: The Police and Border Guard Board refused to provide the information requested by Civio stating that they do not collect this kind of data.
The following countries are pending response:
Bulgaria: The request for transparency, made by Francesco Martino of EDJNet partner OBC Transeuropa, remains unanswered since September 2023.
Belgium: Joel Matriche, of Francesco Martino Le Soir, requested the information from the Belgian administration, which has so far only provided data on people who have died in detention centers for foreigners, which we did not include in our analysis.
Poland: We requested the information from the Ministry of the Interior, which referred us to the Police. The Police replied that they do not have data at the level of detail requested. We asked them to provide us with data at the level of detail available, to which they have not responded to date.
Civio has also requested this information from the Ministries of the Interior and police departments of Bulgaria, Greece, Lithuania, Cyprus, Croatia, Luxembourg, Malta and Norway, but they have so far failed to respond.
