The National Police Chiefs’ Council has said officers are ‘determined to do more’ to hold abusers to account where their victims have been driven to die by suicide. However, forces face mounting resource pressures and rising caseloads, compounded by justice system backlogs.
Families have complained that investigations into domestic abuse were dropped after a victim took their own life. Assistant Commissioner, Louisa Rolfe, the NPCC lead for domestic abuse, said officers can be too quick to assume that suicides are ‘a case for the coroner, not an investigation to be had by policing’.
Rolfe explained that the police force is ‘overwhelmed’ with ‘more work than they can cope with’ as, whilst police investigators work over their usual caseloads. This means the police prioritise victims that need imminent protection over responding to posthumous cases where the victim is no longer around to be protected.
Rolfe’s comments were in response to research that found under-reporting and overlooking of cases by the police regarding women driven to suicide by their abusers. The Guardian revealed that research suggests the official statistics in England and Wales can only track up to 6.5% of the true number of cases of female suicides with domestic abuse at their core.
Rolfe said national guidance has been changed and they have seen some improvements as a result, such as seeing more posthumous investigations. For example, Scotland Yard has introduced a ‘daily review process’ to ensure a second opinion has been given on unexpected deaths. This helps to prevent the premature closing of a case as a suicide. Additionally, police forces have been urged to introduce a local review system similar to that introduced by the Met after the case of Stephen Port. This would entail senior oversight of decisions not to pursue a criminal investigation.
The case of Kiena Dawes illustrated the difficulty in securing a conviction for manslaughter or homicide charges in domestic violence cases. Despite Dawes having recorded a note on her phone saying ‘Ryan Wellings killed me,’ he was cleared of manslaughter and only found guilty for offences relating to coercive control and assault. The Guardian also recently reported on the case of Katie Madden who died by suicide just hours after her abusive ex-partner told her to kill herself, but there was no criminal investigation launched.
