- cross-posted to:
- canadapolitics
- canada
- cross-posted to:
- canadapolitics
- canada
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/30385203
BACKGROUND
Joanna Berry is a Canadian immigration and refugee lawyer in Ontario, Canada. On October 2, two Niagara Police Officers, one of them a sergeant detective, paid her a visit to her home. They told her they were there on behalf of the Ottawa Police Department because of her “personal social media.” They begin to tell her that “10 lawyers who are of the Jewish faith” have filed a complaint with the police about her social media. As you can tell from the video, Joanna Berry, is outraged by the visit and clearly distraught. I reached out to the Niagara Regional Police for comment but they did not respond to my inquiry. I spoke with Joanna Berry also and she gave OTL Media permission to publish the video. She told us that she wants Canadians to see it and for the video to be a warning.
“This is very Orwellian”
On The Line Media is run by Samira Mohyeddin, a multi-award-winning journalist, documentary maker, and producer at CBC Radio One’s The Current.
According to the video, she tells the officers that she can guess who must have filed the complaint, and that “No one has said ‘Stop messaging me.’” The police respond that they’re there to tell her to stop messaging these people, but she says that if people don’t want to hear her, they should tell her themselves or they should block her.
Frankly she sounds a bit unhinged and I would have to see the content of her messages before I could judge whether or not the visit from the police was appropriate. Is she just posting controversial things on her own page (in which case the police shouldn’t be there) or is she repeatedly sending other people messages that they can reasonably perceive as harassment?
If it is just a bunch of unhinged messages or even spamming … then people can just block her messages. They can also contact the media company where the posts were shared to report her behaviour and have something done about it. If it is a private service in the public sphere (like twitter or facebook), then there are ways to inform her, reprimand her, block her account or even delete her account.
Even she had said something illegal … like threaten death or violence then the police would have stated that is what they were there for. Instead all they basically say is to ask her to stop saying bad things online. If the police were always like that, they’d be visiting people on a daily … hourly basis to ask millions of people to stop saying bad things online.
This woman wasn’t charged with anything nor told in detail why these police were even at her house … they just make vague statements that there were complaints against her online about some things she said and asked her to stop.
This is a clear overstep by police to intimidate someone because of something they said about a foreign country. This is Canada, not 1933 Germany.
She didn’t exactly give them a chance to talk.
If it were a serious criminal matter … they would not have allowed her to interrupt them
They couldn’t speak over her because they knew full well that they had no right to be there. These are probably two of the dumbest cops in Ontario to have allowed themselves to be filmed like this.
They had a right to be there since she invited them in, and then they no longer had a right to be there after she told them to leave so they did. The events in the video could well be an attempt to illegally intimidate a person for expressing political views, but they could also be an attempt to resolve a case of harassment without having to involve the courts, in which case the fact that they left doesn’t necessarily mean that she won’t get a summons later.
Whatever reason why they went in or whether or not they had a right to or not … they basically spent an hour out of their workday of investigating more serious crimes in their area to go over to a woman’s house to tell her to stop saying bad or disagreeable things online to unknown (or unidentified) people. Sure the video is only 7 minutes long but it takes time to drive to someone’s house, then drive back and then spend whatever amount of time at the office to get informed about the visit and get organized for it … all that work, just to tell a woman to stop saying things online.
Murders, car thefts, robberies, assaults and actual threats and they had to ignore all that for an hour just to tell a woman to stop saying things online.
as police detectives famously do