Deadly Silences

A death following police intervention or while in police custody immediately raises the question of the responsibility of the forces of law and order and can lead to public protests. Independent bodies responsible for monitoring such cases have existed for decades in some countries but not in France. The only public data are those published in the press or online. Our aim was to identify cases through a systematic search of individual situations published in the press or on the Internet.We retrospectively searched for cases of deaths occurring while in police custody or following police interventions in France between January 1 2007 and December 31 2018 that had been published in the press or online. We identified 142 people over 12 years an average of 12 per year. The most frequent circumstances of death were firearm-related deaths (43%) public road accidents (16%) mechanical asphyxiation (14%) and other traumatic contexts (11%).