Peel police are reviewing a video from a dashboard camera that has gone viral, showing a driver who appears to have the right of way colliding with a car that turns into a Brampton intersection. Someone claiming to be the driver posted the video online, alleging they were wrongly charged, while the other driver got off.
A Peel police spokesperson said the force is currently reviewing the video and the investigation carried out by the officer who laid the charge Sunday.
“Protocol is the police goes and investigates the incident,” Constable Bally Saini told the Star Wednesday.
It’s possible that the video might not have been available to the officer when he conducted his investigation at the scene.
Saini confirmed that a charge was laid, but did not release the person’s name or which driver had been charged. “You speak to the drivers and you speak to the witnesses at the scene, everybody is spoken to at the scene as part of your investigation. You form your grounds on the information and that’s when the charges are laid.”
Someone describing themself as the dashcam driver who said in the post online that they had been charged posted the video on YouTube Monday and it had been viewed just over 900,000 times as of 1 pm Wednesday.
Under the YouTube profile “Brampton Citizen”, the poster writes that the officer told him the female driver of the other car had two “independent witnesses” who said she was not at fault. According to the posted account the driver says a charge was then laid against “Brampton Citizen” the owner of the dashcam.
The video footage shows the car with the dashcam had a green light as it approached the intersection, going straight, when the car driven by the woman approaching from the opposite direction turns left into the intersection and strikes the other vehicle.
The person who posted the statement, Brampton Citizen, writes that during the subsequent investigation the officer spoke with Brampton Citizen. “I told him that she turned and ran into me when I had the green,” the post reads.
In the video, voices can be heard shortly after the crash saying it was not the woman’s fault, even though the footage contradicts the witnesses’ claims.
Brampton Citizen states in the post that when the officer was getting information, “At the time my brother was on his way with his laptop so I could try and retrieve the video from the camera to show the cop.”
It’s unclear if the video was made available to the officer at the scene.
Brampton Citizen later states in the YouTube post: “The officer refused to look at the video footage saying I should have told him before I had a dashcam, but I explained that I was trying to retrieve the footage at the time…He just went into his car after taking initial statements and wrote his report. I told him I have the objective evidence but he did not want to look at it at all and told me to use it as evidence in the court.”
Constable Saini said that “depending on new information” from the force’s review of the incident, the initial decision could change.
“The officers in charge are reviewing all information (including the investigating officer’s notes) to determine what actually happened…that’s what we have to look into, was the video available, or if it wasn’t available.”
Contact San Grewal at 416 550-0555
