Rebuilding our index meant reading every Prevention of Future Death report page on judiciary.uk. Along the way, an automated check turned up a set of small but fixable inconsistencies in the published data.
None of this is a criticism of the reports themselves, or of the coroners who write them — these are publishing and metadata issues, the sort of thing that accumulates in any large collection of documents maintained over more than a decade. But because these reports are important public records that people cite and link to, accuracy and findability matter. Here's what we found across 6,340 report pages.
The single most common issue: about 68 report-page URLs spell the deceased's name
differently from the page's own "Deceased name" field. For example, the page for Linda Brooks
lives at a URL ending /linda-books…; Abdulrahman Alajmi's at
/adulrahman-alajmi…. Because the URL is the permanent, citable link, a typo there is the
one most worth fixing — it's what ends up in references, court bundles and news articles.
In about 34 reports, the reference number baked into the PDF's filename differs from the reference shown on the page (for instance a page numbered 2025-0441 attaching a file named …2025-0411). In one case, the PDF attached to a report appears to be an unrelated "firearms-licensing thematic report" rather than the report itself. We also found one page serving a 0-byte PDF and one report page with no PDF attached at all.
This is the kind of thing you only see when you look at the whole collection at once. Reading one report, a typo in its URL is invisible. Reading all 6,340 and cross-checking each URL against the name on the page, the pattern jumps out. The same is true of the reports' contents — which is exactly why we think making them searchable together is worth doing.