'Denying Justice': Does the Tort of Negligent Investigation Go Far Enough?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although recognizing a tort of negligent investigation should be heralded as an important victory for the protection of citizens against unreasonable actions of the state, the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Hill v. Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Police Services Board leaves much to be desired. First, given the prevalence of wrongful convictions resulting from substandard police practices, it is deeply disturbing that there was a dissenting judgment on the issue of whether a tort of negligent investigation should be established. Secondly, although the majority decision recognised that the police owe a duty of care to suspects, the analysis surrounding the standard of care essentially ensures that negligence will rarely be found. In determining that the police did not breach the standard of care expected of reasonable police officers in these particular circumstances, the court set an impossibly high standard for plaintiffs to prove police negligence, and one that mirrors the stringent requirements of pre-existing torts such as malicious prosecution and false arrest. Moreover, an analysis of the role of systemic racism in the wrongful conviction of Mr Hill was noticeably absent. Ultimately, the Canadian justice system has distinguished itself in the common law world by recognizing a tort of negligent investigation; however, the change may be more symbolic than real if the threshold for proving a breach of duty is set too high. This obstacle has particularly troubling implications for members of Aboriginal and other racialized communities who are disproportionately targeted and harmed by the criminal justice system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.072 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.039 | 0.034 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".