The Police Chief Sued Me, Then Bailed: Defeating a $1.5M Intimidation Campaign on the Frontlines of Carceral Capitalism

I woke up one morning in early April to a knock on my door and being served a $1.5 million lawsuit by the Chief of Police.

For those who know me, you can imagine how honoured I was. Here was an opportunity to publicly be challenged by a police chief for everyone to see. I have poured immense time and energy into confronting Sarnia Police Chief Derek Davis and the Police Services Board who enabled him — rubber stamping all of his egregious policies and reckless movements, including bringing in members from his past police force of Halton and treating me like I had some sort of axe to grind against progress and keeping people safe. Even Chrissy McRoberts (who now hilariously is running for mayor) sent out an email to the board calling my work truth bending while she spent her time in board meetings licking the chief’s boots.

The moment he arrived in Sarnia, you could feel the air change. He embodied everything I have fought against since I learned how imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism shape our world — and he sat at the top of a $30 million a year organization with hundreds of armed, state-paid employees at his command.

You felt it especially in how Davis weaponized media. He built a digital gossip platform on social media where thousands of unmoderated comments shamed, doxxed, insulted, and ridiculed vulnerable people. Media releases dripped with sensationalism — heroic cops versus the bad guys — manufacturing fear around trivial situations while positioning police as the only saviors. I wrote extensively deconstructing this narrative control in pieces like the Journal’s coverage of SPS violating its own department policy for easy laughs, the chief’s propaganda choosing social media engagement over the law, Hot Tub Copaganda, and This Is How the Police State Works. The board will have to do a lot of backtracking to undo the damage.

They sued me in part because the Journal kept exposing the Bradley Murray hire — Davis’s judgment in bringing in a past colleague who pleaded guilty to stealing opioids and was promoted quickly to head of intelligence. We called out the video of them physically blocking me at the Dane Nisbet media scrum — part of their broader campaign to bar and chill critical journalism.

It all started ramping up after I posted this video naming my suspicions. And it kept going — like in the video I did on excessive force in Mitton Village.

Don’t get me started on the predictive policing ideology he imported through his private software company, Norigen. That software was built right here in Sarnia while he was hiring his business partner Joseph Glover as a full-time Sarnia Police Service employee — with Sarnia as the pilot test, all on taxpayer dime. This is the larger battle we need to fight — not just predictive policing in general, but his specific software that’s now spreading across the province (we know of at least four other police services in Ontario using Norigen’s software owned by Derek Davis). It’s dangerous for communities because it turns policing into pre-crime surveillance that targets the poor and marginalized before anything happens, inflates minor issues into “threats,” and entrenches carceral control instead of care. And the chief is still profiting off it in other police services. Every community subjected to it will be worse off, and that fight continues.

The city of Sarnia should seek damages against Davis and Norigen and figure out how to claim proprietary rights over software that was apparently built in-house on our dime.

I am an abolitionist and anarchist. My work is dedicated to speaking truth to power and loudly imagining a Sarnia — and a world — built on love, kindness, grace, and peace as the foundation for how we organize resources and care for one another so everyone can thrive. I’ve been reading, being formed by, and acting in solidarity and in the tradition of Gustavo Gutiérrez, Mariame Kaba, Geo Maher, Harsha Walia, Yves Engler, Dimitri Lascaris, bell hooks, Óscar Romero, the Berrigan Brothers, and thinkers like David Graeber. All of them point toward our collective liberation.

I’ve spent decades formed by all these voices. This fight mirrors the same hollow hierarchies I’ve always challenged — institutions performing competency through metrics and spectacle while the real work of care gets abandoned. I drew that same line in my open letter to Paul Wiersma and in my open letter to frontline officers: the divide between workers facing real trauma and a top-heavy administration hiding behind staff emotions to protect their own immunity. Greg’s piece on how we’re importing a big-city Halton policing culture into our small, humble city showed exactly what Davis brought with him.

The antithesis to collective liberation is empire: force, violence, coercion. Authority entrenching its own power at everyone else’s expense. When the Police Services Board, led by Paul Wiersma, acted as a bureaucratic shield — pushing egregious ideas like a $230 million headquarters, complete with strategic planning sessions that were really just a guise for the new building and public meetings where they asked for more budget but put zero money toward the very issues they claimed were happening — it was clear this would be a long fight. It exemplified the apocalyptic reality we’re in: police branding themselves as protectors while targeting the poor, marginalized, and oppressed. They tried to silence the forensic work on their “spectacle of competency” — the social media posts proudly displaying seized socks and candy bars as theatre while an average of two Sarnia-Lambton neighbors die every month from overdoses, the “catch and release” narrative blaming courts for social failures while using fear to demand bloated budgets. I broke that spin down in detail in this column and others like budget magic and $9 million later.

They even tried reclassifying The Sarnia Journal as a “blog” in the board minutes and in public media scrums — a blatant, systemic move to delegitimize independent journalism and citizen accountability.

I chose to self-represent instead of feeding lawyers, who function as protectors of power and extensions of the state — an entire industry of bullshit jobs built to create barriers to justice, gatekeep the system, and extract capital from the working class while shielding those at the top. They even offered me $5,000 to just walk away from the whole thing once they saw my defense. I refused. I spent hundreds of hours learning the system and building a case rooted in truth, journalism, public interest, and deep care for the collective. No single man should run a public corporation for his private benefit, especially when his ideology grants him a sense of immunity — and especially not against an independent journalist, newsroom, and citizen who is simply working within his rights for the good of the public.

I want to thank Greg, Robynne, and Reagan for their incredible support, wisdom, research, and solidarity with me and the Journal as we faced this lawsuit.

The dominoes fell once Paul left and Kelly Ash started listening to officers and the community. Chief Derek Davis suspended. Ron Hansen suspended. Joe Glover resigned. Bradley Murray suspended. The board pulled funding for the lawsuit against me. On May 29, 2026, they filed a Notice of Discontinuance. They folded. I am now pursuing a motion for costs under Rule 23.05 — forcing them to answer for weaponizing taxpayer dollars in a SLAPP suit against an independent journalist.

We stand here now with a meeting scheduled with the new interim chief next week. I will go in strong, laying out exactly what the people of Sarnia deserve:

• Immediate termination of all Norigen and predictive policing software contracts
• An end to digital pillorying and unmoderated social media shaming
• Full budget transparency that redirects funds away from a “police fortress” and toward off-market housing, non-carceral community care, and actual safety models rooted in care instead of coercion
• A serious priority on reducing excessive use of force, with real de-escalation training and alternatives that treat force as a last resort (especially while they’re out here buying a used armoured vehicle)
• And real attention to treating frontline workers with dignity while addressing the internal dynamics of the corrupt power ideology Davis spread across the entire organization.

This fight was never just a personal battle. It was a public autopsy of how power operates — and a demonstration that it can be resisted and dismantled. I remain committed to building the Sarnia where love and mutual aid replace force, where everyone thrives, and where no institution is above accountability.

The work continues.