Court Of Appeal Affirms Police Owe No Private Law Duty Of Care To Victims Or Their Families

Connelly v Toronto (Police Services Board), 2018 ONCA 368

On April 16, 2018, the Court of Appeal for Ontario released its decision in Connelly v Toronto (Police Services Board), 2018 ONCA 368 affirming that police do not owe a private law duty of care to victims of crime and their families in relation to the investigation of alleged crimes.

Background

This case arises out of the tragic death of the plaintiffs' son on December 9, 2001 after he fell from a ten-storey apartment building. The cause of death was the subject of considerable dispute between the police and the plaintiffs. Following an investigation, the police concluded that the death was a suicide and that the victim had jumped from the roof of the building. The plaintiffs strongly disagreed and believed that their son had been murdered — they suspected he had either been dropped or pushed off of the building. They believed that the police determination of suicide was the result of a poorly conducted investigation, and cited a number of alleged deficiencies in the investigation that should have resulted in a finding of "foul play" rather than suicide.

Ultimately, the plaintiffs brought a claim against the Toronto Police Services Board ("TPSB"), alleging negligent investigation and seeking a declaration that the police should reinvestigate their son's death as a homicide. The TPSB brought a motion to strike the claim under Rule 21 of the Rules of Civil Procedure on the basis that no duty of care was owed by police to victims of crime and their families and that the plaintiffs' claim disclosed no reasonable cause of action or was statute barred.

The plaintiffs argued that the police owed a duty to them, as family members of a victim of crime, to conduct "a reasonably diligent investigation of [their son's] death and to properly classify the death as a homicide or undetermined." The motion judge disagreed, holding that the Court of Appeal had already determined in Norris v Gatien and Wellington v Ontario that no duty of care existed between police and the victims of crime and their families. The motion judge found that it was plain and obvious that the TPSB did not owe a duty of care to the plaintiffs and struck the claim in its entirety.

In reaching this conclusion, the motion judge reflected upon the tension between the wishes of victims and their families, and the duties owed by the police while conducting an investigation:

An individual's desire for a certain form of...