Tweet seeks ‘spliff ’ dealer. Cops ask, ‘Can we come?’
GTA auto-shop worker looks online for pot but attracts the police — and then gets fired
If you’re going to tweet about buying, selling or using drugs, it’s probably best not to also tweet the police. One man from the Greater Toronto Area, identified on Twitter as Sunith Baheerathan, learned this the hard way Tuesday with this tweet that attracted the wrong kind of attention: “Any dealers in Vaughan wanna make a 20sac chop? Come to Keele/Langstaff Mr. Lube, need a spliff.” Police might never have known had it not been for an earlier, unrelated tweet Baheerathan sent.
That tweet included “@YRP,” the Twitter username for the York Regional Police.
That tweet prompted police to click on Baheerathan’s profile, and Const. Blair McQuillan said the first thing they saw was the now infamous tweet.
“This person made a request for a drug dealer or a drug trafficker to attend their place of business, but no actual offence had taken place at that time,” McQuillan said, so police “decided a lighthearted approach would be best.”
The “lighthearted approach” involved jokingly asking to tag along for the drop. Police tweeted: “Awesome! Can we come too?”
That tweet went viral, retweeted more than 2,700 times in the first 24 hours.
Baheerathan’s username was also trending in the Toronto area Tuesday night and someone posted a picture of the response to photo-sharing site Imgur, captioning it: “Canada doing Twitter right.”
McQuillan said the police response mixed “humour and levity” with education, but several hours after police brought the issue to the attention of Baheerathan’s employers, Baheerathan tweeted he’d received a “call of termination.”
His employer, Mr. Lube, also tweeted “the matter has now been handled.”
An employer at the Mr. Lube location mentioned in Baheerathan’s tweet, who would not share his name, confirmed to The Canadian Press that Baheerathan had been fired Wednesday, but would not say whether his dismissal was related to his online activities. Despite some Twitter users voicing their support for Baheerathan, saying the issue was blown out of proportion, McQuillan said there’s no difference between “standing on a street corner yelling out that you want to purchase drugs” and tweeting it. “You’re putting it out for the entire universe to see and hear,” he said, adding that the police follow up online just the same as they would if they overheard someone asking for drugs on the street. But Baheerathan, who didn’t return requests for comment, tweeted repeatedly that his words shouldn’t be taken seriously. By Wednesday evening, his Twitter account was closed. After tweeting jokes about being famous, he also expressed regret over the incident, writing: “Can’t lie, stupid move but would y’all have no- ticed that tweet if YRP didn’t retweet it?” Baheerathan isn’t the first person to get a comical tweet from York police. In November, a Twitter user @BRITTVNY used the popular catchphrase “that awkward moment when” to describe smoking a joint near a police station. They were quick to respond, tweet- ing: “That awkward moment when you realize you just drew way too much unwanted attention to yourself. Drugs are bad Brittany.”
McQuillan said police need to strike a mix of education and entertainment if they want to be heard online.
“It allows us to show that there are people behind the badge,” he said. “This is a great way for us to engage our community.”