Bungled Police Emergency Calls and the Problems with Unique Duties of Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Michael v The Chief Constable of South Wales Police the UKSC struck out a fatal accidents claim brought by the family of a victim of domestic abuse. Two different police forces bungled Ms Michael’s calls for help on the emergency line immediately before she was murdered. The claim failed because the court held that the law ought not to recognize unique public duties of care, that is duties not owed by similarly situated private defendants in ordinary negligence law. Michael has been described as one of the most important negligence decisions ever rendered in UK law. Yet the question of unique public duties is generally ignored in Canada. This article explores first the complicated Canadian law of negligence governing duties to provide benefits to another. It concludes that Canadian courts would probably have permitted the Michael case to go to trial based on the ordinary principles that apply to private parties. Specifically, it bases this conclusion on an enriched notion of “assumption of responsibility” emerging from recent rights-based scholarship. The article concludes by considering the alternative argument that lies at the core of the Michael decision. Ought the courts to create a unique public duty that would have applied to the police in Michael? It concludes that unique public duties of care constitute an objectionable and unworkable intrusion by the courts on the prerogative of the legislatures. Fortunately, ordinary Canadian negligence law is sufficiently adaptive to deal with cases like Michael without needing to create a unique duty of care.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".