TORONTO -- Police have launched an investigation after a video surfaced appearing to show a car doing donuts in the middle of a Toronto intersection while spectators cheered and set off fireworks.
Investigators say they were called to the area of Dixon and Carlingview drives around 12:30 a.m. on May 17 after receiving reports that about 300 vehicles were in the area.
In a video obtained by CTV News Toronto, a crowd of people can be seen on the sidewalks watching and filming a vehicle squealing around the pavement in circles. At one point, the spectators set off fireworks straight up into the sky.
Toronto police have said they are investigating, but have not released any further details.
The incident is one in a long string of stunt driving events that have occurred in the last week. Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) say that 97 drivers have been charged with street racing or stunt driving in the Greater Toronto Area over the last week.
According to OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt, about half the charges were laid over the long weekend.
“We had a motorist charged with not only street racing, stunt driving at 170 kilometres an hour but also registered two times the legal limit of alcohol while driving a vehicle down the highway,” Schmidt said. “We still saw far too many people driving aggressively, not paying attention, not sharing the roads.”
Police have said that over the last few months there has been an increase in the number of street racing and stunt driving incidents, one of the factors being there is less traffic on the roads due to the pandemic.
“From our numbers already this year, street racing, stunt driving and aggressive driving is the number one killer on provincial roads.”
Last week, a 16-year-old driver had his license suspended and his mother’s car impounded after he was caught travelling about 120 kilometres an hour in a 60-kilometre-per-hour zone in York Region.
The police officer who stopped the teenager was heard on video giving him an opportunity to call his parents, who were unaware he had the car, and tell them their vehicle was going to be impounded.
York Regional Police said they laid more than 300 charges for stunt driving, defined as going more than 50 kilometeres per hour over the speed limit, in a 10-day time span.
