A Toronto Police officer’s decision to fire 14 bullets into the hood of a stationary car in the busy Distillery District has raised questions about use of force guidelines and whether the officer overreacted to a perceived threat.

Toronto Police Service (TPS) is keeping secret the name of the officer who stood in front of the stolen car after a short noon-hour chase Wednesday and fired at the car in two distinct bursts with four colleagues and three squad cars in the immediate vicinity.

Edward Skotnicki, 60, was arrested immediately after the incident at Parliament and Mill Sts. and charged with stealing a car, dangerous driving, failing to stop for police, driving while disqualified and possessing stolen property.

Skotnicki has a history of dangerous car chases, though police spokesperson Const. Jenifferjit Sidhu said officers did not know his identity when they apprehended him.

A video of the altercation shows a silver sedan surrounded by three squad cars; its windshield wipers are on while one police car slowly rolls forward. Two officers stand at the driver’s side of the car yelling instructions, another walks calmly around the other side, while a fourth officer standing in front of the car opens fire into the hood.

None of the other officers had drawn their guns.

Photos of the scene show at least a dozen holes immediately adjacent to the sedan’s left headlight.

“It was an unusual situation, and it was a situation that happened in a very public place at a very public time in terms of the hour of the day,” said Mayor John Tory, speaking after the Toronto Police Services Board meeting.

Tory said he would reserve commenting on the shooting until all the internal investigation is completed, but said, “any time a gun is discharged in the city, it is of concern.”

The officer involved has not been suspended, Police Chief Mark Saunders said, though an internal investigation into the incident has been launched and the gun has been seized for analysis. Police spokesperson Meaghan Gray said that unless the officer is on scheduled days off or took time off, there is no procedural reason why he wouldn’t have been at work on Thursday.

Firearms instructor Richard Holmes says the officer’s actions appear to be a textbook example of how to disable a car.

“You want to put as many as you can in there to really disable it quick,” said Holmes.

Fired from in front of the car, Holmes said, the bullets enter though the radiator and can damage a number of essential parts. There’s little reason to worry about ricochets, he said, because bullets would pancake inside the engine compartment and are unlikely to exit.

But another firearms instructor, Tony Cooper, said the video of the incident made him cringe.

“I don’t know what the officer was thinking. I was very glad that nobody was injured as a result,” Cooper wrote in an email.

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Lawyer Lawrence Gridin, who has represented police officers in two cases where they fired on cars, says both the Police Services Act and Toronto police policy ban officers using their weapons to stop vehicles.

“The Toronto Police Service has a prohibition on shooting at cars. You can’t shoot at a car for the purpose of disabling it… You can’t shoot at a driver for the purpose of stopping the car,” Gridin said.

The TPS policy, however, allows for officers to use their discretion if they feel the threat is great enough, Gridin said. The best example of this was when Richard Kachkar pinned a police officer against a garbage truck with his snowplow. The officers who opened fire on him did not face criminal or Police Act charges for their actions.

But because a moving car can be a lethal threat, Gridin says anyone — police officer or civilian — could be justified in using a firearm to defend themselves.

Saunders told reporters that a vehicle can’t always be considered a weapon. “There has to be something else that has to be observed that will cause an officer to discharge a firearm,” he said.

Gridin said his firm defended one officer who had fired on a car that was reversing away from him. The officer was criminally charged with careless use of a firearm, but a judge dismissed the charges.

The arrested man, Skotnicki, made a brief appearance in a downtown Toronto courtroom Thursday morning, where he was represented by duty counsel.

He has been tangling with the law since the 1970s, racking up more than 160 charges according to court records, though it is unclear how many resulted in convictions.

In 2007 Skotnicki, already banned from driving, sparked a car chase that resulted in a female police officer being dragged 25 metres by his pickup truck and a collision with a minivan containing a family with young children. As the Star reported at the time, it was a miracle no one was seriously injured.

A year later, he was convicted of three similar charges and sentenced to five years and nine months in prison.

He now faces five charges. He will return to court next week.