Charges have been dropped against a man who was punched by a Whitehorse RCMP officer during an arrest earlier this year.

The fracas was filmed by a witness on Easter Sunday and went viral on social media.

It shows a young man, who was later identified as 26-year-old Joshua Skookum, lying on the kitchen floor in a Jeckell Street home.

An RCMP officer appears to hit him in the facial area.

He then rolls Skookum onto his stomach and tells him several times to put his hands behind his back, but Skookum is unresponsive.

The officer then pulls the man’s arms behind his back and handcuffs him.

The video is about one minute and 30 seconds long.

Skookum was charged with four offences in connection with the incident, including resisting arrest and assaulting a peace officer.

Two days later, Whitehorse RCMP announced the incident was under investigation by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT).

The officer in the video, whose name has not been released, was placed on administrative duty.

As Skookum is a member of the Little Salmon-Carmacks First Nation, Chief Eric Fairclough was appointed as a community liaison for the investigation.

Last month, the charges were dropped against Skookum in territorial court.

Marc Lecorre, a Crown prosecutor in the Northwest Territories, handled the file due to potential conflict of interest in the Yukon Crown’s office.

“Given the evidence against Mr. Skookum, the Crown was not satisfied that there would be a reasonable prospect of conviction at trial,” Lecorre told the Star this morning.

He declined to say specifically how he came to that decision.

In general, Lecorre said, the Crown looks at two things: whether there is likely to be a conviction given the evidence, and whether prosecuting the matter is in the public interest.

The Crown also takes into account other factors.

Those include the credibility of witnesses, the admissibility of evidence, defences available to the accused, and any violations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that will lead to the exclusion of evidence.

“All of those things affect reasonable prospect of conviction,” Lecorre said.

“In this case, given the totality of the evidence and the circumstances, there was no reasonable prospect of conviction.”

He would not say whether the RCMP’s use of force was a factor in the decision to drop the charges against Skookum.

ASIRT spokeswoman Lynn Crawford said this morning the organization’s investigation is ongoing. It’s not yet known when it will be completed, she said.