SIU clears Waterloo Regional Police officers after man breaks leg during arrest

The SIU investigation determined there was no criminal offence in an arrest in Brampton where a man suffered a fractured leg. The force used during the incident was deemed justified.

The Special Investigations Unit (SIU) found a Waterloo Regional Police officer did not commit a criminal offence after a man suffered a fractured leg during an arrest in Brampton. The SIU heard on March 21, Waterloo Regional Police plainclothes officers with the Gangs and Hate Crimes Unit were at the Canadian Convention Centre in Brampton looking to arrest a group of men suspected in a series of tractor trailer load thefts. Three of the men, the SIU was told, arrived in a pickup truck, before a dark-coloured car parked adjacent to the truck.

The man who made the complaint against police, who also had an arrest warrant from Canada Border Services Agency, was driving the car. Officers surveilled the men, saying they saw the complainant remove items from the trunk and place them on the bed of the pickup truck. The officers decided to arrest the men.

Seeing the unmarked cars converging, the men got in their vehicles and tried to flee. The pickup driver reversed and accelerated forward repeatedly to push the police vehicles in front of them enough to get room to escape. The driver of the car tried to do the same thing, but he came to a stop after hitting a light standard.

An officer used this time to smash out the driver’s window with his baton and attempted to “incapacitate” the complainant through the window with his Conducted Energy Weapon (CEW), but neither discharge was effective. CEW deployment data showed the first time the CEW was fired one or no probes connected, while the data for the second deployment showed both probes went into the man’s skin initially, but the connection didn’t last. Officers struggled to remove the complainant from the car, partially because the door was wedged against the light standard, but eventually forced him out and took him to the ground.

One officer kneed the man twice in the lower torso before being handcuffed, while the other punched and kneed him twice. Paramedics took the complainant to hospital, where he was diagnosed with a fractured right femur. SIU director Joseph Martino said any force used to get the complainant out of his car was not excessive as he was using it as a weapon against the officers, and would likely continue to do so had they not got him out.

Having the CEW fail to subdue him exacerbated the situation. Once the complainant was out of the vehicle, Martino said, he wasn’t able to “reasonably conclude” the force used was excessive under the circumstances, with the officers saying the man resisted and the complainant saying he didn’t. “While I accept that the complainant’s leg was fractured at some point in the dynamic sequence of events that culminated in his arrest, there are no reasonable grounds to believe the injury is attributable to unlawful conduct on the part of the arresting officers,” he said.

The SIU is a civilian law enforcement agency that investigates incidents involving an official where there has been death, serious injury, the discharge of a firearm at a person or an allegation of sexual assault.