VIDEO: Police officer goes to break up 'fight,' gets in dance-off

ByABC7.com staff KABC logo
Friday, February 10, 2017
Police officer goes to break up 'fight,' gets in dance-off
Officer Jarrod Singh thought he was going to bust up a fight, but instead ended up busting a move.

OSHAWA, Canada (KABC) -- A police officer thought he was being called to break up a fight in Canada, but instead found himself break dancing.

It was nearing the end of Officer Jarrod Singh's shift Sunday evening when he responded to the scene of what a passerby believed to be a fight in downtown Oshawa, Ontario.

The "fight" turned out to be a group of college students shooting a music video.

"I saw eight people gathered around one person, so I can see how a member of the public thought it was a fight," Singh said in a statement released by the Durham Regional Police Service. "But when I got closer, I could see he was break dancing in the middle and there was someone filming it."

In the middle of the dance troupe from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology was 23-year-old Mahdi Altarfi, an international student from Saudi Arabia.

"When the cops showed up the guys filming were like, 'Quick, quick,' because they were nervous and thought they were going to make us leave," Altarfi told ABC News. "Then he told me he was a hip-hop dancer."

"I was like, 'OK, show me something. Can you?'" Altarfi recalled.

Singh - who was relieved to see there was no fight, just funk - busted into some killer dance moves.

"I was like, OK, this guy can move," Altarfi told ABC News. "He finished and was going to leave and I said, 'No man, it's not that easy,' and asked him to do another dance with me."

Singh, who became an officer a little more than a year ago, was busting moves before he started busting criminals. He was a part of a dance troupe at Durham College and was featured in several music videos. The group once even opened for hip-hop artist Rick Ross.

The music video shoot was set up by Vivid Media who captured all the action of Singh and Altarfi freestyle dancing.

University of Ontario dancer Mani Chahal shared the video on Facebook and it went viral, amassing more than 1 million views.

ABC News contributed to this report.