SIU clears York police officer over Pickering arrest

The Special Investigations Unit has cleared a York Regional Police officer in the July 9 arrest of a 39-year-old man who suffered a broken nose in a Pickering parking lot.

SIU Director Joseph Martino found no reasonable grounds to believe the officer committed a criminal offence, according to a director’s report for case 26-OCI-314 dated Nov. 3, 2026. Martino closed the file, writing that there was “no basis for proceeding with criminal charges in this case.”

The arrest followed a report of a break and enter at a home in Vaughan. The report said officers tracked a Honda Odyssey from the area with help from the York Regional Police helicopter, Air2, to the parking lot of the Pickering Playing Fields at 1610 Bayly St. Several police vehicles surrounded the van shortly before 10:30 a.m.

The officer under investigation reached the van first, opened the driver’s door and pulled the man out of the seat and onto the ground, the report said. Other officers pulled a passenger from the back seat. Officers used force on both people on the ground, including several kicks to the man by another officer, before both were handcuffed behind the back.

The man speaks Spanish and was arrested through an interpreter for break and enter and possession of break and enter tools. At the station he first declined medical treatment, then asked for an ambulance. Later that evening he complained of head pain and was taken to Mackenzie Health, where he was diagnosed with a fractured nose. He told a paramedic that officers had hit him hard, the report said.

Martino said the evidence included a version of events in which the man was struck in the face two or three times inside the van and was punched and kicked repeatedly on the ground without resisting. He wrote that this account was called into question by the helicopter video, which shows the officer struggling to pull the man from the vehicle, “suggesting an altercation of sorts.” One officer told the SIU he saw the man fighting the officer and anchoring himself in the van. The officer who kicked the man said he did so because the man kept resisting on the ground.

The report’s summary of the helicopter video also says one officer used his leg to stomp downward five times where the man lay on the ground. Martino did not find the force excessive on the officers’ account of events. He said there was no reason to prefer the account that incriminated the officers over theirs, and some reason to doubt it.

Martino said officers were within their rights to move in on the man given they had tracked him from the break-in, and that his quick arrest was a matter of pressing public interest. Under section 25(1) of the Criminal Code, police are protected from criminal liability for force that is reasonably necessary to carry out their duties.

The officer under investigation declined to be interviewed by the SIU or to provide notes, which is his legal right. Six other officers who witnessed the arrest were interviewed. The report does not say what became of the break-and-enter allegation against the man, and any charges against him are unproven. The report does not name the man or any of the officers.

The SIU investigates incidents involving police in Ontario that result in death, serious injury, allegations of sexual assault or a firearm being discharged at a person. The director can lay charges only when there are reasonable grounds to believe an offence was committed. The decision follows other reports this month, including the clearing of Toronto officers after a man was hurt in a July arrest and of a Guelph officer after a cyclist hit a cruiser. In another case, the unit charged an OPP officer over an arrest injury in Caledon East.

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