Robinson v Chief Constable

Facts

Police officers attempted to arrest a suspected drug dealer in a busy street in Huddersfield. In the struggle the suspect, the officers and an elderly passer-by, Mrs Robinson, were brought together and she was knocked to the ground and injured. She sued the Chief Constable in negligence.

History

Her claim failed in the courts below and she appealed to the Supreme Court.

Issue

Whether the police owed Mrs Robinson a duty of care when their arrest attempt foreseeably endangered a bystander, or whether the police were immune from a duty of care in the course of their operational functions.

Held

Appeal allowed. The police owed a duty of care because they had by their own positive act exposed a bystander to a foreseeable risk of physical injury, and no special immunity applied.

Ratio

• The question whether a duty of care exists is answered by applying established principles where they exist; only in novel situations does the court reason incrementally by analogy with decided cases and consider matters of policy, and the three-stage test is not a general test to be applied in every case.
• The police are subject to the ordinary law of negligence, including liability for causing foreseeable physical injury by a positive act, and the general rule that there is no liability for failing to protect from third parties does not apply where they themselves create the danger.

The judgments

Key reasoning

• The earlier decisions on police liability concern omissions to protect the public from harm caused by third parties and do not grant a general exemption; where the police cause harm by positive acts, ordinary rules apply.
• The authorities on negligence show a duty is normally recognised where harm is foreseeably caused by a positive act, and the earlier case law on assumption of responsibility and proximity merely expresses how the courts apply and explain those rules.
• The application of public policy to deny a duty is exceptional and requires a reason, and there was no reason to treat injury to a bystander during an arrest differently from other injuries negligently caused.

Obiter

• The duty of care in cases of omission is to be determined by recognised exceptions, such as where the defendant has assumed responsibility or has created the danger or controls the third party, and not by a general test of foreseeability and policy.

Where it fits in the module

For Tort and Administrative Law, Robinson is the starred authority on negligence liability of public bodies and on how to determine duty of care generally. It frames the argument whether police and other public authorities have special immunities or only the same duties as private persons, whether the omissions principle is the true basis of earlier decisions, and what role Caparo and policy play. Students must be able to set it against Hill, Michael v Chief Constable of South Wales Police [2015] UKSC 2 and the later cases on public authority liability.

Criticisms

• The retreat from a general Caparo test leaves the boundary between established categories and novel cases unclear, and the proposed incremental approach may be criticised as a restatement of the very factors which the three-part test used to express.
• Distinguishing positive acts from omissions is notoriously difficult, so the principle on which the earlier police cases are now explained may not give predictable results in operational policing.
• By treating public policy as a reason only to deny a duty in exceptional cases, the judgment leaves unresolved how courts should account for the burden of liability on the police in a way consistent with open-ended negligence.
• The decision is arguably inconsistent with the actual reasoning in the earlier police cases, which treated public interest in effective policing as itself material to duty.