FOI Reference: FOI/2021/3406
You asked
The total number of police officers, in England and Wales, that have died by suicide each year 2001-2020.
Additionally, it would be useful if you could also provide these figures broken down by:
- Gender
- Age
- Rank
We said
Thank you for your request.
For suicides involving occupation, please see the following publication: Suicide by occupation, England and Wales, 2011 to 2020 registrations
This provides the number of suicides by sex, country, and occupation, for deaths registered 2011 to 2020.
For deaths registered in earlier years please see the following user requested dataset: Number of police officers that died by suicide in England and Wales, 2001 to 2017
Please note that the numbers detailed here cannot be used to ascertain the risk of suicide among occupations. Differences in numbers of deaths may merely reflect the underlying population structure as opposed to differences in risk.
Data on occupation is coded using the Standard Occupation Classification (SOC 2010). In all, there are 9 major groups of occupations (for example, skilled trades occupations); 25 sub-major groups (for example, skilled construction and building trades); 90 minor groups (for example, building finishing trades); and more than 350 individual occupations (for example, painters and decorators). Full lists of occupations used in the analysis are reported in the accompanying data tables, and descriptions of these can be found in ONS Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) Hierarchy. The report is structured so that it describes larger categories of occupations before moving on to describe risk in specific occupations. Please be made aware that we have limited information on ranks as per SOC coding and only the following breakdowns are held:
1172 Senior police officers
3312 Police officers (sergeant and below
3315 Police community support officers
Please note, suspected suicide deaths are investigated by a coroner in what's known as an inquest. The amount of time it takes to hold an inquest causes a delay between the date of death and the date of death registration, referred to as a registration delay. Registration delays for deaths caused by suicide tend to be 5 to 6 months on average. More information about the impact of registration delays is available here.
We only hold mortality data for England and Wales based on the information collected at death registration.
If these do not meet your needs or you would like to include an age breakdown, we can supply this as a bespoke data request. Once again please be made aware that the breakdown of ranking is limited to the above mentioned three categories so a bespoke request would be limited to these three categories and would not be able to provide for example Constable, Detective, Inspector etc. Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate).
As this information is already available to you via this route ONS considers that S21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. S21(1) is an absolute exemption, and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.
Such enquiries would fall outside of the Freedom of Information regime and should be made to: Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.