Forensic Architecture secures major funding for research into police deaths

Forensic Architecture are the recipients of a Wellcome Discovery Award that will bring an inter-disciplinary team together to explore the intersections between race, policing, and mental health.

People racialised as Black are more likely to be diagnosed with a mental health condition, less likely to receive treatment and seven times more likely to be killed by police restraints. In many of these cases the term Acute Behavioural Disturbance or Excited Delirium have been used to explain the cause of death. Despite lacking any credibility as a recognised mental health condition, these terms continue to be used to explain deaths in police custody, particularly restraint-related deaths.

Called Unlearning 'Excited Delirium’, the research will seek to better assess the role of restraint in fatal police encounters, interrogate policies and practices, and trace the racist legacy and enduring influence of a pseudo-diagnosis known as 'Excited Delirium' and its UK inheritor Acute Behavioural Disturbance. The research project will combine FA expertise in advanced spatial analysis and visual forensics with statistics, medico-legal research, sociology, and history.

Building on the success of the 2021 exhibition War Inna Babylon at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, curated by Tottenham Rights and featuring work by Forensic Architecture, the Unlearning 'Excited Delirium' project will culminate in a second major exhibition on policing in the UK, comprising talks, film screenings, video investigations, community commissions, guided tours, and educational visits aimed at driving lasting social change.

Stafford Scott, Guest Professor in Forensic Architecture, said: 'We are proud that this award will power a community-led, justice-driven model of investigative research, one rooted in the knowledge, resistance, and lived experience of families who have survived the harms of racialised police violence. 

The Wellcome Discovery Award funds bold and creative research aimed at delivering a significant shift in understanding related to human life health and well-being, and is open to established researchers and teams from any discipline.