Toronto police say an internal investigation is underway after a video circulating on social media appeared to show an officer giving a citizen the middle finger over an argument about alleged illegal parking last week.
In the video, which has been viewed more than 425,000 times on TikTok, two Toronto police officers are seen ordering Starbucks in the area of Front and Berkeley streets near the city’s Distillery District on Friday afternoon.
The exchange continues for several minutes and the officers eventually get back in their cruiser. The video then shows one of them giving the citizen the middle finger from the passenger seat of the cruiser.
The individual who took the video later told CP24 that he doesn’t believe the officer knew they were being filmed as by that point he had put away the body camera he was using previously. The footage, he said, came from a pair of glasses with a built-in camera.
Great but… What’s there to investigate? They parked illegally, they refused to even say “oopsie”, let alone ticket themselves as they should, and then gave the finger. It’s all on a few minutes video, this is not rocket science.
Just punish this behaviour accordingly, put them on a week of unpaid leave and require them to take some training or something, tell the rest of the police force to start fucking behaving themselves like the example they are supposed to be.
No investigation required