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'Officer Bubbles' Sues YouTube Commenters Over Mockery
An anonymous reader writes "'Officer Bubbles' — the Toronto Police Constable who was videotaped threatening a G20 protester with arrest for assault over the crime of blowing bubbles at a police officer has had enough of mocking videos and comments on YouTube. He has decided to sue everyone involved (commenters included) for more than a million dollars each. The complaint is detailed in his statement of claim — most of the comments seem fairly tame by internet standards; if this goes anywhere, everyone is going to have to watch what they say pretty carefully. The lawsuit appears to have been successful in intimidating the author of the mocking cartoons into taking them down."
They need to collectively countersue him for legal fees.
Technoli
And suing people making sarcastic comments on the internet is going to make everyone respect him... sure, let's go with that.
Yes. In Canada they're Royal douches!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yeah.. I love the way 'Officer Bubbles (*)' laywer is saying 'the videos are now removed and that is the end of it'.
Someone is about to have a very bad morning.
(*) I'd make a joke about Michael Jackson and chimps in uniform here, but mocking the dead... now that -is- sick.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Well..it's good to see that it's not only cops in the US that are douches...
And I was thinking "it's good to see that it's not only people in the US that are douches..."
Cops aren't people, silly!
Anyone who actively seeks becoming a cop (or a politician) has already proven they are fundamentally the wrong person for the job.
It seems having them behave more like public servants and less like gangbangers might be helpful in more cases than just this one.
The gang in blue somedays seems far more dangerous to public safety than many others.
No. Officer bubble should sit down with a psychiatrist. Other people didn't do anything wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sue me.
You can't take the sky from me...
Mad Dogs and Policemen.
So this is why police don't like to be filmed?! It makes them accountable for their douchery after the fact.
Looks like the court of public opinion made its ruling on Officer Bubbles, I sure hope the official court sees things the same way.
I know we didn't get to see the crowd very well, but the part of we we did see in that video was anything but ugly. Mostly just people milling about, taking pictures, and one lady blowing bubbles. It wasn't exactly a mob situation. It didn't even sound very angry in the background.
I read the internet for the articles.
Citizens need the right to record any public police action, and any police action in which the individual citizen is involved.
This needs to be a law now.
The public needs a clear law allowing for the recording of police actions and allowing for the recording to be owned by the citizen and protected from seizure by police officers.
Some police do lie, some police do overstep the bounds, some police protect fellow officers.
I don't think it's all that hard for an adult to understand that blowing soap bubbles into a police officers face is going to get you arrested, and he did give her the courtesy of a warning first. I don't really see the controversy there. Well, not unless people are unable to disentagle the word "bubble" from the "soap" part. Blowing a rather effective eye irritant in a cops direction isn't likely to end well, no matter if it's in bubble or other form.
By that logic, allowing children to play with soap bubble is child endangerment.
You can't take the sky from me...
Because they're used to exercising petty authority, and cannot stand having their miniscule power challenged. This has been the case since humans first built cities.
Just be glad this retard doesn't have the power of life and death like his contemporaries had in ancient times. Just goes to show - the best measure of civilization is the ease with which a citizen can point and laugh at a stupid official.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Are you for real? Don't you know bubbles are a detergent? A DETERGENT for God's sake! The situation was on the precipice of doom. DOOOM!
Parody. When you purposely exaggerate certain aspects of a situation in order to show how ridiculous it is. The officer Bubbles video is textbook parody. No more no less.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Standard crowd control tactics. If you're facing an ugly mob
Cute girl blowing bubbles scares the ever living shit out of a 6+ feet tall, heavily armed and well backed-up man, see it on youTube!
You can't take the sky from me...
The amusing bit is that somehow I missed hearing about the whole Officer Bubbles thing until he decided to sue, which brought him up in the news again. Had the little jackass just kept his mouth shut and taken his well-deserved lumps for arresting a girl for assault-with-a-deadly-bubble, I'd never have known about him. I'm sure there are many others out there in the same boat. So he's brought quite a bit more shame and embarrassment on himself with this latest stunt.
I wonder if he'll sue.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
If they just act without thinking, why not use machines instead?
Seems like it would be cheaper.
Police officers are trained to create a zone of control around themselves, which would include things like threatening random passers-by and generally acting like thugs, its standard crowd control tactics, and while very far from acceptable civilised behaviour, it does work.
If "standard crowd control tactics" doesn't accomplish anything and introduces new liabilities, they should rewrite their playbook.
"Civilized" means "we gave up power so that there would be less evil in the world; we can't be consumed by fear and doubt and in that panic destroy people." As a tradeoff, certain trustworthy individuals must have power to prevent those who remain un-civilized from harming others. The only reason that's okay is because they can be trusted. He showed then, and he's showing now, he can't be trusted. He will be consumed, and he will hurt people, and he doesn't care. Get him off the fucking street.
I am not a doctor or a lawyer.
I'm reading the document, and I think some things are clear:
"Josephs is a police officer who abuses his position of authority"
"Josephs mistreats members of the public"
"Josephs is incompetent and unfit to be a police officer"
"Josephs has psychological problems"
"Josephs is a narcissist"
"Josephs bullies members of the public"
"Josephs is egotistical"
Even if they weren't true following the protest event that was publicised on YouTube, they are true now that he's filed the lawsuit.
Hopefully he's forced to actually present evidence of damages and not just to sit their weeping on the stand and crying about how his lack of dignity was publicised resulting in a lack of public respect for him.
If he were to emphasize the statement under Sec.IV.40, ("Damages... Josephs has received threats of physical harm") I'm sure the public would have to remind him that police officers sign onto a job that is not popular with the public, and that threats against their person for so much as taking the job are something to be weathered.
Sec.IV.41 notes that the defendant acted "callously" towards Josephs, and who knows -- in Canada, maybe there isn't really freedom of speech.
What's obvious to me, though, underneath all of this, is that Josephs intends to amass over a million dollars and probably to use it to boost a career in entertainment. That's what people usually do when internet publicity ruins their lives -- they take the internet up on the offer and try to make good of their own charicature.
At any rate, it's boring, I never heard of it before and I'm not likely to hear of it again, since it's Canadian, not America.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I know we didn't get to see the crowd very well, but the part of we we did see in that video was anything but ugly. Mostly just people milling about, taking pictures, and one lady blowing bubbles. It wasn't exactly a mob situation. It didn't even sound very angry in the background.
This is a G20 summit meeting, these people are there to protest their policies. Therefore, they are opposed to the entrenched power, therefore they are to subdued, beaten, and subjugated. That is what Toronto Police constable Adam Josephs was telling himself, as he wished the camera wasn't there so he could show that little white bitch who's the real man in that street. Sure, Adam Joseph probably can't get "it" up, but the city of Toronto conveniently provides him with a big black rod he can use for just such an occasion.
Yes, I believe Toronto Police Const. Adam Josephs is a potential rapist, and believe that he does not routinely act on his impulses only because he has difficulty maintaining an erection. I do hope that litigious bastard doesn't find out who I am, he would surely sue me, and attempt to insert his night stick in my rectum to compensate for his lack of genital endowment through acts of abuse of power such as the one depicted in the video.
You can't take the sky from me...
Some times they won't be aggressive enough and things will turn ugly... other times they'll be too aggressive and look dumb.
I couldn't agree more; it starts innocently enough with one person blowing bubbles, but what if someone else had started... two people blowing bubbles. Then three... how many bubble blowers should we as a society have to tolerate before we start supporting our police officer's efforts to stamp out this reckless waste of washing up liquid?
On second thought, maybe the cop should have stepped 3 inches further back and made this otherwise lethal weapon system wholly ineffective. Based on his over-reaction, this guy should be more than familiar with exactly how far 3 inches is...
It's not? I'm an adult and I find it hard to understanding the criminal basis of blowing bubbles. In fact, I think blowing bubbles is a pretty excellent example of a thing that is nearly impossible to consider assault.
Streisand effect.
This guy was seriously power tripping in the video. Why should anybody be surprised to find that he responds similarly to criticism? I suspect that even the officer next to him thinks he's a jackass, judging by how hard it looked like she was struggling to bite her tongue.
Congrats, "Officer Bubbles". In my opinion, and that of most of the Internet viewing public, you just proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you do not belong in uniform. Cops who are incapable of treating others with courtesy have no business interacting with the public. Give that guy a desk job, make him a crime scene investigator, whatever, but take him the heck off of any sort of duty where he interacts with the public on a regular basis.
P.S. To "Officer Bubbles", I hope the people you are suing hit you with a SLAPP-back suit so fast it makes your LAWYER shit his pants... followed by having your sorry ass brought up on barratry charges.
Welcome to the real world, where criticism is protected speech (unless it is threatening or libelous in nature, which opinions almost by definition cannot be).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
And often, taking 'control' of the situation means backing off. Moving back a few feet, losing the shades (notice the female officer with her glasses up) and smiling would have defused the whole thing right there.
It's not like she was being particularly menacing. The officer was being an aggressive jerk for no good reason. Makes everybody look bad.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yeah, but when the maniacs have something as deadly as soap bubbles, well all bets are off. A man has got to do what a man has got to do to protect society from bubbles. I don't like to use the term hero lightly, but in this case...
"But this one goes to 11!"
Yup, I'm not saying he was justified, but in all likelihood he was just doing exactly as his training dictated.
If so, why didn't the female officer next to him *not* react in the same way, instead silently bearing a look of embarrassment for her colleague's overreaction? Would she not have received the same training?
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
They are trained to take control of situations and something silly like not respecting their authority and blowing bubbles can sometimes escalate quickly into something worse.
So, a cop sees you doing something he doesn't like (say maybe dancing, or listening to music) and decides you're not "respecting his authority" - it gives him the right to come over to you and harrass you?
fuck that.
This cop had a choice - he could have just ignored it. The female cop that was talking to the protester has no problem, why did Officer Bubbles have to stick his nose in it?
She stopped when asked. Watch the video again. After he says "If the bubble touches me, you're going to be arrested for assault," no more bubbles are seen.
Right. Which is why I pointed out that it's interesting that there is no footage of her immediately prior to her arrest. According to this article, she wasn't even arrested for the bubbles.
However, according to CNews, Winkels [the lady] confirmed that she wasn’t arrested for blowing bubbles but instead detained for wearing a backpack and having a lawyer’s number written on her arm. She was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit mischief over $5,000.
So are people really upset that she was asked to stop or are they just misinformed due to suggestive editing in the video?
I thought the young woman officer was handling herself very well. Either could have easily diffused the situation with a "please put the bubbles away ma'am, I don't want them getting in my/her eyes". And escalating from there, instead it's "If a bubble touches me, I'm going to arrest you for assault! That's a deliberate act! It's a detergent!! You want to bait the police!". He escalated the situation well past where it was, and was being far from professional.
No one was following anyone around blowing bubbles, so your analogy falls flat. I'm guessing by worse you mean that you would shoot someone putting a flower down the barrel of your gun. Cops need to be held to a higher standard then what you or I would do, because they have been entrusted with a certain amount of authority over other people.
You can tell which cops feel that they have adequate control over their own personal lives and which do not.
Cops are there to serve and protect, unfortunately, their unions have all but eliminated that obligation.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
The cops puts on a plastic face protector and thus totally cancels out her weapon of mass cleaning.
Cops want the situation to turn ugly, they want to crack skulls, otherwise they would not use these methods at all.
I think it's pretty clear from the video that he wasn't talking to the mob. He was talking one-on-one to a single individual.
It took all of two seconds to find a copy of the video in question here. Not sure why the officer's lawyer thinks they got it taken down successfully unless I'm missing something....
I just love the look of shock on the female cop's face when this guy suddenly butted into a polite conversation between her and the completely peaceful, friendly female protester and threatened to arrest her for assault if one of the bubbles touched him. The "tell" was that her jaw dropped *very* visibly. So even other cops on scene thought his behavior was out of line. Based on that, it's hard to believe anyone could defend his behavior.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
They've probably been in situations in the past where it turned ugly.
One second people are blowing bubbles and the next they are throwing bubble bottles and then next it's rocks and people are setting cars and buildings on fire and looting.
To be fair it doesn't count when the people throwing rocks and setting cars on fire are "agent provocateurs" (for which Canadian police actually admitted to using in the past).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur
However, according to CNews, Winkels [the lady] confirmed that she wasn’t arrested for blowing bubbles but instead detained for wearing a backpack and having a lawyer’s number written on her arm. She was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit mischief over $5,000.
So are people really upset that she was asked to stop or are they just misinformed due to suggestive editing in the video?
Wow that seems an even more ridiculous reason for arrest then for blowing bubbles.
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
Actually no he's not power tripping. Defamation of a public figure and suing over that is legal in Canada.
Welcome to Canada post Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Then again most people outside of Canada, and most inside Canada have no clue how the law works here.
Om, nomnomnom...
You seem to forget that in the US, you're not allowed to protest these things at all.
Apparently the right of people to peacefully assemble somehow means that the government is allowed to tell people where they can peacefully assemble, so whenever something like a G20 summit or the Democratic National Convention occurs,US Police set up "free speech zones" where people are allowed to protest without any danger of anyone noticing them.
Protesting anywhere else will get your arrested.
And, yes, I'm calling out the DNC here, not because the Republicans don't do it too (they do), but because the Democrats did it first.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
One second people are blowing bubbles and the next they are throwing bubble bottles and then next it's rocks and people are setting cars and buildings on fire and looting.
Erm... What the fuck are you talking about? It's like I've entered an alternate dimension in which blowing bubbles is the first step onto becoming an international terrorist. Containing the situation is _entirely_ different from what was seen in the video. The cop was intimidating and overly aggressive.
Confrontationalism like this is what often escalates situations up the straight linear path from bubble blowing to arson and looting.
Wow... honestly.
He didn't give her a warning. He gave her a threat.
I guess. He did give her a "threat" of arrest if she continued her behavior. Some might call that a "warning". It seems a pointless exercise in semantics.
No, he gave her an arbitrary order, followed by "or else". She was doing something perfectly legal, and a cop told her to stop or he would arrest her on a trumped up charge if she did not obey him immediately.
That's abuse of power. That's not something you should defend.
don't expect me to cry any tears over the injustice of it all
Oh, don't worry, I don't expect you to cry over an injustice. I expect you probably get half a hard-on when you witness an injustice, I figure your love for authority (and the limitless exercise thereof) must be conflated with your lust.
You can't take the sky from me...
I endure insulting comments and inane questions at work all the time. Ever been to an inter-departmental meeting? Feel free to pop along with a camera crew and bring some bubbles, it'll actually help me endure the pain and loathing.
A cop is supposed to be able to put up with way, WAY worse things in a demonstration environment - they're trained to put up with that sort of crap, and if Officer Bubbles breaks his training maybe he shouldn't be on the front line of a police demo response unit.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Found 'em:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MisterOfficerBubbles
It's an hilarious parody of that news clip! http://www.youtube.com/user/MisterOfficerBubbles#p/a/u/1/CvqEazn9dG8
You can't take the sky from me...
You do know that here in Canada we have free health care, including mental-health, right?
So the fact are:
- the police admitted putting "undercover" agents in the civilian crowd.
- the agents were concealing their identities
- they were holding rocks
These are all far more intimidating actions than blowing bubbles into the air which a civilian was punished for.
Perhaps your police buddy can beat some sense into c6gunner.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/08/23/police-montebello.html
"Police said the three undercover officers were only at the protest to locate and identify non-peaceful protesters in order to prevent any incidents.
Police came under fire Tuesday, when a video surfaced on YouTube that appeared to show three plainclothes police officers at the protest with bandanas across their faces. One of the men was carrying a rock.
In the video, protest organizers in suits order the men to put the rock down, call them police instigators and try unsuccessfully to unmask them."
This video shows the broader context of the "Officer Bubbles" confrontation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVwXOKZh4Os&feature=channel
You can't take the sky from me...