This book investigates death after police contact in England and Wales in the twenty-first century. It examines how regulatory bodies construct accountability in such cases. Cases of death after police contact have the potential to cause deep unease in society. They highlight the unique role of the police in being legitimately able to use force whilst at the same time being expected to preserve life. People who are from Black, or Minority Ethnic backgrounds, or have mental health issues, or are dependent on substances are disproportionately more likely to die in these cases, and this emphasises the sensitive nature of many of these deaths to society. Deaths after Police Contact examines police legitimacy and the legitimacy of police regulators in these cases. The book argues that accountability is produced by a relatively arbitrary system of regulation that investigates such deaths as individual cases, rather than attempting to learn lessons from annual trends and patterns that might prevent future deaths. It will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of policing and criminal justice.

This book explores the relationship between policing and mental health. Police services around the world are innovating at pace in order to develop solutions to the problems presented, and popular models are being shared internationally. Nevertheless, disparities and perceptions of unfairness remain commonplace. Innovations remain poorly funded and largely unproven. Drawing together the insights of eminent academics in the UK, the US, Australia and South Africa, the edited collection evaluates the condition of mental health and policing as an interlocked policy area, uncovering and addressing a number of key issues which are shaping police responses to mental health. Due to a relative lack of academic texts pertaining to developments in England and Wales, the volume contains a distinct section on relevant policies and practices. It also includes sections on US and Australian approaches, focusing on Crisis Intervention Teams (CITs), Mental Health Intervention Teams (MHITs), stressors and innovations from Boston in the US to Queensland in Australia. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in policing, criminology, sociology, mental health, cultural studies, social theory and those interested in learning about the condition and trajectory of police responses to mental health.

The US Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice (NIJ) asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of The National Academies to conduct a workshop that would examine the interface of the medicolegal death investigation system and the criminal justice system. NIJ was particularly interested in a workshop in which speakers would highlight not only the status and needs of the medicolegal death investigation system as currently administered by medical examiners and coroners but also its potential to meet emerging issues facing contemporary society in America. Additionally, the workshop was to highlight priority areas for a potential IOM study on this topic. To achieve those goals, IOM constituted the Committee for the Workshop on the Medicolegal Death Investigation System, which developed a workshop that focused on the role of the medical examiner and coroner death investigation system and its promise for improving both the criminal justice system and the public health and health care systems, and their ability to respond to terrorist threats and events. Six panels were formed to highlight different aspects of the medicolegal death investigation system, including ways to improve it and expand it beyond its traditional response and meet growing demands and challenges. This report summarizes the Workshop presentations and discussions that followed them.

Police Related Deaths in the United States examines how police related deaths in the US occur; how investigations are conducted into these deaths; and why such deaths and the investigatory processes into them provoke such concern in the wider American society. The book considers such deaths as being the result of structural and systemic factors in policing, the criminal justice system, and broader socio-political and socio-legal landscapes in the U.S.. It argues that an increasingly aggressive police mindset allied with relatively toothless regulatory frameworks effectively lead to police being enabled by the criminal justice system to use lethal force with relative impunity. The book considers the disproportionate number of deaths in marginalized communities, for example: people of color, people who are mentally unwell, and LGBTQ people. Each chapter in the book begins with a case study of a specific police related death and places issues within that case in the wider context of policing in the US. David Baker argues that the effects of these deaths go beyond merely policing and criminal justice, and corrodes the core fabric of American society.

The Routledge Handbook of Law and Death provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary scholarship on the intersections of law and death in the 21st century. It showcases how socio-legal scholars have contributed to the critical turn in death studies and how the sociology of death has impacted upon the discipline of law. In bringing together prominent academics and emerging experts from a diverse range of disciplines, the Handbook shows how, far from shunning questions of mortality, legal institutions incessantly talk about death. Touching upon the epistemologies and materialities of death, and problems of contested deaths and posthumous harms, the Handbook questions what is distinctive about the disciplinary alignment of law and death, how law regulates and manages death in the everyday, and how thinking with law can enrich our understandings of the presence of death in our lives. In a time when the world is facing global inequalities in living and dying, and legal institutions are increasingly interrogating their relationships to death, this Handbook makes for essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners in law, humanities, and the social sciences.

A young police woman was found shot to death on exclusive Bald Head Island off North Carolina. The local DA ruled it a suicide but the evidence said otherwise. Who killed her and why did they go so far to cover it up? Read for yourself and decide what you think took place and who did it.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) designed the Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) program to be a census of all deaths that occur during the process of arrest in the United States. The manner in which these data were collected varied from state to state, and often depended on the data systems available to the state reporting coordinators (SRCs) responsible for data collection throughout the state, the involvement of local law enforcement agencies or medical examiner's/coroner's offices, and other support that the SRC may have had to conduct the data collection. This variability in approach has led to questions about whether these data collection methods were capable of capturing the universe of arrest-related deaths and law enforcement homicides in particular. BJS requested RTI International to conduct an assessment of the ARD program to evaluate (1) the coverage of the program in comparison to Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHRs) maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and (2) various aspects of the current program .