Ottawa's Somali community continues to react angrily to a police raid on a Somali-owned restaurant last week.

Police raided the restaurant after a neighbour reported seeing a black man with a gun during a dispute between the men in the restaurant and the driver of a truck that was blocking a driveway the restaurant shares with an auto-body shop.

Police handcuffed all the black men inside the restaurant, but not the one white man. The owner had to be taken to hospital after, he says, police banged his head against the wall. No gun was found and no charges were laid.

Members of the city's Somali population say the incident marks a giant step backwards in the relationship between them and the Ottawa Police Service.

Mohamed Mohamud is still furious about the time three years ago when he was charged by Ottawa police and thrown in jail because they mixed him up with another Somali man.

But Mohamud, who hosts a university radio program, Voice of Somalis, says his experience isn't unique.

"When you talk to any member of the Somali community they will tell you a story concerning them, about how bad [a] job these police do when they are on the streets or at home, or anywhere in the city," Mohamud says.

When news of the police raid on the Somali-owned restaurant broke Wednesday, the director of Ottawa's Somali Centre for Family Services, Abdirizak Karod, quickly convened a meeting of community leaders.

Karod says every time relations between the community and police start improving, something like this happens.

"Members of my community called me this morning, and I always say, we have got good working relationship with the police, and we are working with the higher level," Karod says. "They told me this: 'Whatever you do, there is nothing good happening. There will be no success at all.'"

Karod says he'd like to see some sort of public inquiry into the incident.

Deputy Police Chief Larry Hill has promised an internal investigation. He also says a special critical-incident team of police and volunteers will look into the raid.

"I would hope that we haven't, on the basis of one particular incident, gone that far [that] we've lost so much ground, because we have a very positive relationship with the Somali community," Hill says.