Rate My Stupidity

A Florida (of course!) man was arrested and briefly jailed for posting a local police officer’s home address online. Well, it was RateMyCop.com. Really.

“Just because I posted it, I got arrested. It wasn’t like it was the Pentagon Papers,” Robert Brayshaw (35) said. Yes, just point out your crime isn't as big a deal. Soon, murderers can go free as long as it's not more than two dead.

Genius spent nearly three hours in jail and was prosecuted under a 1972 statute making it unlawful to publish personally identifying information of a police officer. Eventually, a federal judge declared the First Amendment trumped Florida’s law meant to protect the privacy of police officers, and now Florida and Tallahassee authorities must pay $60,000 in damages and legal fees to Brayshaw and his ACLU lawyers. That'll come in handy since he's unemployed, and added it's been difficult to get a job because of his 2008 arrest. Not because he's too dull to have common sense.

Brayshaw had a beef with the officer regarding a trespassing flap in which he was not charged, ignorantly admitting she “basically had her information listed publicly in the phone book," as justification. He posted to the site, uses public-records requests to gather the names and, in some cases, badge numbers of thousands of uniformed cops at police departments around the country, and allows users to post comments about police they’ve interacted with.

Brayshaw posted anonymous comments about Officer Annette Garrett, as well as her name and home address — information not normally cataloged by the site. He wrote that Garrett was rude to him when investigating a trespass call at an apartment complex he was managing. “This is the dumbest case in America,” he said, not realizing how dumb it is to post a policeman's personal info on the web.

The authorities subpoenaed RateMyCop and Brayshaw’s internet service provider to learn his identity, then booked him under the Florida law — a misdemeanor carrying up to a year in jail. The case was later dismissed against Brayshaw for procedural reasons, but his balls were just too huge after skipping on a technicality, so he sued, claiming the statute chills his speech. The First Amendment does not protect "true threats, fighting words, incitements to imminent lawless action, and classes of lewd and obscene speech," said the judge, and did not feel that publishing an officer’s phone number and address is "in itself a threat or serious expression of an intent to commit an unlawful act of violence." It's not there so strangers can send a thank you note.

Some cops are real fucking jerks, but if you've got a grudge, that's the last group you want to pick a fight with.