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.
Their job was to inform her, we have a rule of law in this country
Police are meant to inform people about breaking serious laws. We don’t send the police to intimidate someone because they said something bad about a different country.
Plus … if someone has a disagreement about a political opponent … then debate online … if that doesn’t work, complain to the business, complain to their company, complain to the social media company that is hosting the messages.
We don’t jump to the nuclear option and ask the local police to go knocking on people’s doors.
If that were the case, I’d like to ask the local police to a visit a few people that made me feel bad.
The police regularly dismiss unfounded reports without additional action, it’s how they’re supposed to respond. They’re not supposed to tell people “this thing you’re doing is neither illegal or harmful and the people who got upset had to search for it to find it, but they did get upset so you should stop”
Thing is, they didn’t seem to have brought anything to inform her of. If they want to come out of it looking like anything but witless fascist goons trying to intimidate someone, they’re going to need to be a lot more specific than “unwanted messages” to unspecified persons.
She seems to think it was someone she replied to on twitter. I reply to random people on here all the time, just like I’m doing now. If it’s unwanted, by all means send the netiquette cops to my house I guess, we’ll see if I’m able to suppress my derisive laughter long enough to get a video half as good as this one out of it.
Facist goons are the ones pulling the strings. You can hate all you want but it’s clear who the enemy is.
She was notified that there was a complaint against her, unfortunately we still believe in informing people in person for this. Imagine she got an email instead.
Except it wasn’t just a notification that there’s been a complaint. It was “no more unwanted messages, please.”
Aside from that it could be somewhat reasonable if there really is sufficient evidence to suggest that a criminal complaint is warranted. That seems unlikely, but I suppose we should keep an open mind. In the absence of someone digging up some really damning stuff from social media it looks a whole lot more like a lawyerly — and presumably therefore less illegal — attempt at something like “swatting”, albeit a less violent version. The police should know better than to let themselves be used like that, but a lifetime of experience leads me to suspect that maybe they do not.
