A Florida man arrested for posting a local police officer’s address on RateMyCop.com won a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds but has had problems getting a job since his arrest. -db
June 2, 2010
By David Kravets
A Florida man arrested and briefly jailed for posting a local police officer’s home address on a cop-rating site said Wednesday his ordeal was “completely crazy.”
“Just because I posted it, I got arrested. It wasn’t like it was the Pentagon Papers,” Robert Brayshaw, a 35-year-old Tallahassee man, said in a telephone interview.
Brayshaw’s comments came hours after the deadline passed for Florida to appeal a federal judge’s decision declaring the First Amendment trumped Florida’s law meant to protect the privacy of police officers. Brayshaw, who is now unemployed, said it has been difficult to get a job because of his 2008 arrest. He 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.
Florida and Tallahassee authorities agreed to pay $60,000 in damages and legal fees to Brayshaw and his lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Brayshaw said the officer “basically had her information listed publicly in the phone book.” He had a beef with the officer regarding a trespassing flap in which he was not charged.
He posted to RateMyCop.com, a 2-year-old website that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community.
RateMyCop 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. The site’s launch in 2008 drew cries of outrage from police, who complained that they’d be put at risk if their names were on the internet.
Brayshaw used the site to post anonymous comments about Tallahassee Police 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.
His case, he said, bounced through three judges, three prosecutors and four public defenders, amid a year of local court proceedings.
“This is the dumbest case in America,” he said.
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 he sued, claiming the statute chills his speech.
U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak in Tallahassee ruled the First Amendment does not protect “true threats, fighting words, incitements to imminent lawless action, and classes of lewd and obscene speech.” But publishing an officer’s phone number and address, he said, “is not in itself a threat or serious expression of an intent to commit an unlawful act of violence.”
The judge wrote he appreciated the intent of the 38-year-old law, but noted that it went too far. “While the state interest of protecting police officers from harm or death may be compelling,” the judge said the law “was not narrowly tailored to serve this interest.” (.pdf)
Arizona, Colorado and Washington state have similar laws on the books.
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