Driver films VPD officer smashing in his car window

A driver filmed a Vancouver police officer behaving rudely and smashing in his car window, but police say the video doesn't tell the whole story of the altercation.

From the start, the Vancouver police officer’s tone is confrontational.

“Hit the brakes, moron,” the officer says at the beginning of a roughly 90-second video shot by the driver of a vehicle he pulled over.

In the video, which has racked up thousands of views on YouTube since it was posted two days ago, the driver repeatedly asks the officer to explain why he’s been pulled over.

The officer doesn’t initially give an answer. Instead, he repeatedly tells the driver “I’m not playing this game,” and orders him to open his door.

Later, the officer says he smells marijuana, and that the driver is under arrest. The driver disputes this, and asks again why he’s under arrest.

Near the end of the video, the officer threatens to break the driver’s window if he doesn’t comply. When the driver doesn’t, the officer smashes the window.

“You must think I’m f**king joking,” he says, before he and his partner wrestle the driver out of the vehicle.

For criminal lawyer Paul Doroshenko, the video is evidence of “police officers behaving like thugs.”

“The behaviour of the police is just, frankly, shocking to me,” Doroshenko told CTV News. “Whatever happened to politeness? You’ve got somebody pulled over at the roadside, you have an obligation to tell them why you’re detaining them.”

For their part, police say the driver’s video doesn’t tell the whole story.

“The video obviously does not show the entire contact between police and the driver,” said Vancouver police Const. Brian Montague in a statement.

“Our officers would not have had to use any force had the driver simply complied with the officers’ directions,” he said.

The driver was given a roadside sobriety exam, but was not charged with impaired driving. Instead, it’s the drugs police say they found inside the car that got him in trouble. He’s now facing a number of charges.

CTV News reached out to the driver multiple times to request an interview, but received no response. So far, his only account of the incident is the video itself.

With files from CTV Vancouver’s Scott Roberts