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Gothamist Commenter Arrested For Threatening NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly

By

John Del Signore

Published Feb 22, 2012

Modified Feb 22, 2012

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By

John Del Signore

Published Feb 22, 2012

Modified Feb 22, 2012

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Just a friendly reminder that police officers are carefully monitoring your comments on the Internets, so you should probably refrain from threatening to kill anybody. Just sayin! Idiotic death threats are a clear violation of the Gothamist comment policy, and we will not hesitate to cooperate with the NYPD if you're making such threats. A few days ago Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin was subpoenaed by the NYPD over this threatening comment, seen above. Dobkin explains what happened next:

In general, I try to evaluate every subpoena on the merits. If it's a subpoena in a civil case, we'll generally notify the commenter that someone is trying to get their information. Although now that we've switched to Disqus and Facebook authentication, we often don't have email addresses for the commenters, which makes them harder to contact. In criminal cases, the subpoena often prevents us from doing that- our only choice when we believe the subpoena was issued in error or bad faith is to have our lawyers fight it in court.

But in this case, where there was a clear death threat against a public official, I felt there was a strong reason to comply and give up the commenter's IP address (we didn't have his email.) That's not the kind of comment or commenter that we want on our site.

Police sources tell the Post that they've arrested Brooklyn resident Richard Strauss, 49, for allegedly making the comment. (YES, we saved Ray Kelly's life but the Post still got the scoop on this, shut up.) The tabloid's sources say that in April 2004 Strauss was charged with gun possession after firing shots out his window. Yeah, sounds like one of ours.

We do our best to moderate the comments with our tiny staff, but obviously it's a Sisyphean task, and sometimes things slip through. (The subpoena prevents us from deleting this comment for now.) Once again, here are the rules about commenting, and YOU can help moderate comments by flagging them and emailing us when some hateful troll says something heinous. And besides hate speech and threatening to kill people, here are some other comments that the editors are prone to delete:

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John Del Signore

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Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.

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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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