Ontario’s police watchdog has cleared an OPP officer of any wrongdoing in the case of a man who was shot with a projectile and bit by a police dog during a standoff in Norwich four months ago.
Oxford County OPP responded on April 11 to a Dufferin Street home, where a man who had threatened to shoot himself was barricaded inside and cutting himself, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) said in a report released Wednesday.
Tactical officers entered the home around 12:30 am and fired an anti-riot weapon enfield (ARWEN), a device that fires non-lethal projectiles, and sent in a police dog, to arrest the suspect, 44, who was apprehended under the Mental Health Act, the SIU said.
The subject officer, who didn’t give an interview to SIU investigators, as is their legal right, was the second officer to enter the home, where they encountered the complainant in the kitchen, holding a knife to the left side of his neck, the SIU said.
The officer ordered the complainant to drop the knife before firing a round from their ARWEN at him, striking him in the right thigh. The complainant dropped the knife and the police dog bit him in the shoulder and dragged him to the floor, the SIU said.
SIU director Joseph Martino determined the officer’s use of force was justified, citing the risk approaching the armed suspect would have posed to police.
“The complainant was holding a knife at the time and could have used it to inflict injury on him or the officers. On the other hand, the use of an ARWEN carried the potential of temporarily and safely neutralizing the complainant from a safe distance. And that is precisely what occurred,” Martino wrote in his report.
The SIU is a civilian agency that probes all cases of serious injury, death, police gunfire and allegations of sexual assault involving officers.