"The whole austerity policy and its impact over the years though has grown to a crisis… So you've got a lack of officers with those that remain being overwhelmed. [Police] are very thinly stretched, they are beleaguered, morale is low, they feel undervalued… So it's a real perfect storm the government have created that's going to take years to reverse. These figures about the violence are just going to get worse and worse. The system is at breaking point and actually I think it's already broken," Logan said.
"I'm extremely saddened by these figures because instead of things getting better they seem to be getting worse … These raise big questions about police accountability and transparency, and also cases where individuals should be seen as patients and not just prisoners, nor in an adversarial way and not in a safe guarding fashion, especially in terms of the correlation between these cases and mental health," the REALITY chairman added.
On Wednesday, the UK Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) watchdog said that 23 people died in or following police custody in the United Kingdom between April 2017 and March 2018, marking the highest annual figure in a decade.
In April, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said UN experts had conveyed their concerns over the deaths of people of ethnic minorities in custody in the United Kingdom.
