A 21-year veteran officer of the Toronto Police Service has been charged with assault causing bodily harm following an attack on a cyclist.
The incident, which occurred Tuesday on Queen Street West, was caught on tape by a group of students on a field trip.
Const. Darius Tierman, 44, has been charged. Tierman has been on leave from the force since October 2004 but police won't say why.
The 45-year-old cyclist, Andrzej Sokol, stopped for an amber light when he was attacked, police said.
The driver became upset with the cyclist for not riding through the intersection, police said, and began honking his horn and shouting profanities.
The driver then got out of his car tried to grab the cyclist's bicycle before assaulting him, police allege.
The group of students was filming a video for a class project nearby and quickly turned the camera towards the men.
The video shows the confrontation between the two men escalate until the driver kicks the bicycle and attacks the cyclist with a barrage of punches.
Alison Mann, a teacher from Ursula Franklin Academy, was supervising the students and managed to pull over a police cruiser after the fight.
"(The police officer's) response when we pulled him over was lukewarm," she told The Globe and Mail. "But once they saw the footage, they saw how serious it was."
Tierman turned himself in to police on Wednesday.
