OTTAWA -- A son of U.S. President Donald Trump is calling a video of a recent arrest in Gatineau, Quebec "insanity" and is claiming that the kind of confrontation depicted in the video could come to American households.
Donald Trump Jr. was quote tweeting a copy of the video, first posted to social media on New Year's Day, which shows a confrontation between Gatineau police (SPVG) and residents in a home late New Year's Eve. One person could be seen in the video being forcibly removed from the house by officers and taken to the ground.
Police were responding at the time to a complaint about a private gathering, which is prohibited in Gatineau under Quebec's COVID-19 rules.
"This is insanity and it’s coming here soon if you don’t wake the hell up," Trump Jr. told his 6.6 million Twitter followers on Sunday.
The SPVG said Saturday, after the video had racked up tens of thousands of views, that it shows only part of the confrontation and alleged that the man who was arrested had assaulted an officer before the video began.
"The individuals were recalcitrant and refused to co-operate. The individual arrested in the video had assaulted a police officer, hitting him in the face a few times," the SPVG said in a statement.
Six people in the home were issued $1500 fines for the private gathering. Police also arrested the homeowner, who the SPVG said refused to provide their name.
Both of the people who were arrested were released at the scene.
No one was physically harmed, but one of the people seen in the video told CTV News on Saturday that an officer pulled on his mother's arm, which led to an escalation of the confrontation.
"At some point, they had no judgment at all. You can't treat people like this," Mathieu Tessier told CTV News Ottawa. "The truth is they aggressed us."
Trump Jr. has been a vocal critic of COVID-19 restrictions in the U.S., where more than 350,000 people have died, and has frequently downplayed the severity of the pandemic on social media.
