Duty Of Care Case Study

Claim against the Commissioner of Police on the psychiatric injury of Scarlett

Duty of care and breach of duty
The issues are whether the police owed a duty to Scarlett to protect secrecy of the confidential information; and whether the duty was breached by the police by leaving the confidential information in an unattended police vehicle.

To establish the existence of duty of care, foreseeability, relationship of proximity, and fair, just and reasonable should first be proved. In Hill v CC of West Yorkshire , the court found that police would not owe a general duty of care to individual members of the public without any special characteristic or ingredient over and above reasonable foreseeability of likely harm. It is additionally clear
The harm to the plaintiffs in consequence of the theft is thus also foreseeable. A special relationship between the plaintiff and the defendant is sufficiently proximate. The police have to preserve the confidentiality of the information provided by the plaintiff. Failing to do so, it was likely to expose the plaintiff to a special risk of damage from others such as Henry; And the risk is greater than the general risk that the ordinary public members endure with phlegmatic fortitude. The proximity is shown by the assumption of the police’ responsibility to keep the sensitive documents confidential and the assumption of the plaintiff replying of the police’s responsibility. Finally, it is fair, just and reasonable to impose a duty on the police for there are no public policy to exclude the duty of the police in this case and the proper weighting of public policy. In this case, the public policy of the need to preserve the springs of information, and to protect informer is weighted against another public policy- the immunity from liability for negligence in the investigation of crime of police; And the former is considered with greater importance. Therefore, the immunity of police cannot apply in this case. Viewed thus, the police owe a duty of care to
Henry would not have known the information of the plaintiff and then threatened her, if the police had not left the document in an unattended police vehicle. For the legal causation, the issues are whether the theft of the documents was not natural nor foreseeable to amount to novus actus interveniens which breaks the causation chain; and whether the threatens from Henry is an intervening act which therefore negate the liability of the police for the plaintiff’s psychiatric injury. The most important rule applied is that intervening event must be unforeseeable or unnatural. In this case, the theft of the confidential documents is reasonably foreseeable as it was left in an unattended police vehicle, which reasonable person would have anticipated the theft. Even though the police did not expose the documents directly, they put the documents in an insecure position where it was foreseeable that the documents would be stolen. Moreover, it is reasonably foreseeable that Henry would take aggressive act towards the plaintiff. The plaintiff is the information provider for the criminal case which Henry is implicated in killing his neighbor outside the plaintiff’s pub; It is therefore for a reasonable person to foresee that Henry would perform aggressive act towards the plaintiff such as threatening as he was exposed with the