On July 25, 2008, a cyclist taking part in an otherwise peaceful pro-bike rally in New York City was weaving down the centre of the street, causing cars to swerve and brake to avoid him. A police officer ordered him to stop. Instead, the cyclist deliberately drove his bike into the officer, knocking him to the ground and scraping his forearm. The heroic officer responded as he was trained to, subduing and arresting his vicious attacker. The cyclist was charged with assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.

All of this was in the officer's official report. None of it was true.

Sadly for the officer, someone videotaped the incident and posted it on YouTube, a relatively new phenomenon at the time. Millions of people saw what actually happened: Officer Patrick Pogan randomly singled out the cyclist, who was not weaving through traffic and was not causing a disturbance. The officer waited until the biker was lined up in his sights and then hit him with a thundering open-field tackle. The biker barely had time to react before he found himself on the ground with Mr. Pogan pressing his knee down on his head.

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After the video went viral, the charges against the cyclist were dropped and the officer resigned. Mr. Pogan was convicted of lying in his report but was given a suspended sentence. If there is any justice, today he is a crossing guard in East Flatbush.

Fast forward to this week in Toronto, when an Ontario Superior Court judge found that, in January, 2011, a policeman had, for no good reason, punched an innocent man in the head twice, and violated his constitutional rights. There was no video, just the contradictory testimonies of the civilian, a Sudanese refugee named Mutaz Elmardy, and of the officers involved in his brutal and illegal detainment.

In the years between the YouTube bike tackle and the Ontario ruling, there have been many instances where video captured by the cellphone-wielding masses has flatly contradicted official police versions of controversial arrests and shootings. In Vancouver in 2007, a police officer shot and killed a mentally ill man who was allegedly waving a bicycle lock chain in a menacing fashion. Five years later, a cellphone video emerged that showed the man crawling on the street, wounded and empty-handed, when the officer fired the fatal shot. The case was reopened but no charges were laid against the officer.

Last month in South Carolina, a police officer shot and killed a man during a traffic stop. The officer claimed the man had grabbed his taser, so he fired in self-defence. Two days later, a video of the incident was posted online. The victim was running away when the officer drew his gun and fired eight shots at the man's back. The officer has been charged with murder.

How many times in cases of alleged brutality that take place away from a video camera have we been lied to?

How many times have superior officers, courts and civilian oversight bodies been swayed by the claims of a police officer who insisted he or she was in mortal danger when they fired their weapon, and there was no living witness to contradict them?

In general, society has given police the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes, police have to keep order, and sometimes they have to use force to uphold the law. But the blanket trust implicit in this arrangement was granted before society began to see, on video, how unnecessarily violent and brutal some officers can be, and how far they are willing to go to cover their tracks.

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This week's Toronto court case is evidence of a winnowing away of that trust. The judge found Mr. Elmardy's allegations – that he was arbitrarily stopped, searched, arrested, punched and left handcuffed on the ground in the freezing cold with his jacket open for almost half an hour – more reliable than the tangled and unreliable testimony of the officers involved. No video evidence was required.

The judge tore apart the officers' justification for approaching Mr. Elmardy in the first place, and their reasoning for putting him in handcuffs. They claimed they had "hunches" from inside their patrol car that a man walking down the street was violating bail conditions. They said they felt threatened because he had his hands in his pockets. They claimed to see danger in the angle at which he stood relative to them after they got out of their car. They said he was rude and unco-operative.

The judge said not one of those things justified what followed. Of course the man had his hands in his pockets – the temperature that night was -10 C, and Mr. Elmardy had no gloves. His body language was not remotely threatening. And it is perfectly legal for an innocent person to be confrontational when approached abruptly by police who have no valid reason to stop him or to suspect him of having committed a crime.

Canadian law allows an innocent person walking down the street all sorts of latitude in responding to police, including the right not to respond. But for many cops, anything less than bovine docility is grounds for a punch in the face and handcuffing. Mr. Elmardy could have been silent, vociferously angry or singing a song; he could have been facing the officers, or had his back to them, or been walking toward them, or away from them, or around them, or been too close or too far, with one hand in his pocket or wearing mittens, and evidence suggests they still would have reached for it as proof they had no choice but to clock him.

The judge says in his ruling that "when one swears at a policeman, it is probably logical to expect a punch in the face. Many would say it is deserved. But it is not." Exactly. Police need to be smarter and better trained than that. It's not just desirable, it's the law.

If officers don't have the wherewithal to remain calm and respectful when a citizen exercises their constitutional right to tell them to go to hell, then they need to consider another job. Crossing guard, for instance. The police are not the law, and new steps must be taken to ensure they always remain subject to it. More next week.