Article content continued

OPP in Collingwood dealing with a coyote on my street. Video 2 Posted by Sarah Leggett on Monday, October 19, 2015

“I can’t see any other reason why people are doing it,” Gatto, who’s now Guelph’s public information officer, says. “Anything I’ve seen on YouTube seems to have negative connotations for sure.”

There are no laws against filming police officers in public.

But whether police are being filmed or not is insignificant, Gatto says, because they’re taught to perform their duties in the same way.

Gatto says the filming of officers is “common.” A search of “Guelph police” on YouTube immediately brings up several videos of police interactions. The first video, titled “Guelph cop harassment post C-51 march” shows an officer stopping two people in a truck and asking the passenger for a driver’s licence.

The problem with videos of police altercations being filmed by citizens, Gatto says, is that they’re filmed from only one perspective. And perspectives can lie.

He remembers a training exercise where half his class watched a video of an altercation filmed from one angle and the other half of the class saw it from a different angle.

“It’s like oh my god what did that officer just do?” Gatto says. “And then you see the other angle it’s like ah, now that makes sense.”

Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack says citizen-filmed videos of police “don’t tell the reality of the story.”

Toronto police Const. James Forcillo is currently on trial for second-degree murder and attempted murder after the shooting of Sammy Yatim on a TTC streetcar. A bystander’s video of the shooting went viral and police were instantly accused of murder on social media.