The Special Investigations Unit has cleared a York Region police officer who shot at a suspect in August in Vaughan.

The incident took place at around 8:15 p.m. Aug. 13, the SIU said in a news release last Friday.

Police spotted a stolen Dodge Neon travelling west on Steeles Avenue of speeds upwards of 100 km/h.

When the 26-year-old driver came to a stop at a red light on Islington Avenue, officers approached the vehicle and ordered the driver to put the vehicle in park and raise his hands, the SIU said in its report.

Video evidence showed the driver instead accelerated towards one of the officers, who fired eight rounds at the vehicle, striking him five times. The officer avoided being hit by the car.

The driver came to a stop after ramming into the rear end of another stopped vehicle. He was arrested for theft and attempted murder and taken to hospital with serious injuries. A female passenger who was in the same vehicle did not suffer from any serious injuries.

In the SIU’s report, director Joseph Martino called the officer’s actions “necessary to protect himself from possible death or grievous injury” and said it was a “first and foremost, an act of self-defence.”

The first six shots, Martino wrote, were fired at the vehicle while the driver was accelerating towards the officer. However, the final two shots were fired when the driver had already stopped and incapacitated. Martino called this an “error,” but a “reasonable” one.

“Consider the speed with which events unfolded and the innate tension of the situation — faced with a vehicle at close range moving in his direction and with only split seconds at his disposal to decide how he was going to react, the dissipation of the threat apparent in hindsight was likely not as clear to the (subject officer) in the heat of the moment.” Martino said in the report.

The SIU is an arm’s-length provincial agency tasked with investigating incidents involving police officers that lead to serious injury or death as well as sexual assault allegations against officers.

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TY Tom Yun is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star's radio room in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @thetomyun

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