There has been quite a bit of buzz in the Internet recently surrounding the actions a rookie New York City cop took during a Critical Mass ride through Times Square. A bystander caught the officer on tape body checking a bicyclist to the ground.

The Smoking Gun got in on the action and promptly posted the official report the officer submitted about the incident, much of which is in direct contradiction to the events caught on camera.

Judging from the sources, the outrage from many people stems from the fact that the attack on the bicyclist seems unprovoked and overly violent. People expect the NYPD to be more courteous, or at least not tackle cyclists in the street, it seems.The officer has been stripped of his badge and gun pending review, and is reportedly on desk duty for the foreseeable future. This all sounds fairly standard for a police force with proper internal controls. Now we wait for the hearing and justice to prevail, yes?Not on the Internet, they don’t. If there is one thing to take away from this incident, it is that the mob justice of the Internet is swift and brutal. There are websites now that are providing more information than the bicycle tackling cop would probably ever have wanted to find about himself online.

We won’t link to those sites, but a cursory overview of some of them reveals:

The Officer’s Badge Number
The Officer’s Age
The Officer’s Full Name
The Officer’s Family Information (father and mother’s names, careers)
Where the Officer Attended High School (and class year)
The Officer’s Home Address (with both street and map views)
The Officer’s Phone Number
The Officer’s Facebook Profile
The Officer’s Past Legal Issues

If you have any private information on the Internet you must understand that this can become (and already is, to some extent) public information. Anyone with relatively basic computer skills can dig up and repost information. They can even make stuff up, if they like, and they have a platform from which to disseminate their views. In this instance a police officer upset some people and his actions were caught on tape (we won’t wade into the arguments for/against justification, that’s not our job). Now he has very quickly learned how online information can be wielded to attain what the internet perceives as justice.

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