aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Cops go bonkers over RateMyCop.com

Let’s begin with Radley Balko’s telling of the saga:

So even as police departments across the country are setting up sex offender registries, drug offender registries, and posting the mugs and names of suspected johns online, they also took a great deal umbrage early this month when Gino Sesto set up a site called RateMyCop.com.  The premise is simple:  Sesto wrote to police departments across the country, and obtained a list of the names and badge numbers of their officers.  He then posted the names online in a format broken down by state and city, and encouraged users to rate their experiences with individual officers.  All of the information he posted was already open to the public.  He didn’t post the identities of any undercover officers.

Police groups went nuts, making the dubious argument that posting the publicly-available names and badge numbers of police officers on the Internet somehow jeopardized the safety of individual officers.  Sesto said he had even planned on adding a feature that would allow individual officers to write responses to complaints made against them.  But police groups persisted. 

Jerry Dyer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, told Wired the site could give citizens the opportunity to "unfairly malign" individual officers, and said he’d be asking the legislature to pass a law making sites like RateMyCop.com illegal.

On Monday TechDirt noted Arizona police were complaining about it:

The site doesn’t have pictures, addresses, or other personal information on the site. It only lists officers’ names and the department they work for. But this is still too much for the Tempe police department. “If everybody went home everyday and you had the whole world ranking your job, we do make mistakes, but other days we do great things,” said one Tempe police officer. I’ve have a lot more sympathy for the guy if this wasn’t true of a ton of other professions. When I do a stupid blog post, you guys all leave comments saying so. Most restaurants and retail business have complaint cards so customers can complain about bad service. There are a ton of sites where consumers rate hotels, bands, restaurants, books, and a ton of other stuff—such as rating teachers (although some people do want to make that illegal too). The big difference is that police officers have the force of law behind them, so they need to be held to a higher standard than other professions...When a police officer screws up, the result can be innocent people being harrassed, humiliated, arrested, injured or killed.

On Wednesday, Wired’s Threat Level reported that GoDaddy pulled the site:

RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he’d been shut down for “suspicious activity.”

When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. “How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,00 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?”

GoDaddy’s is a checkered past:

Unfortunately for the startup, the company it chose for hosting is known to be quick to censor its customers. In January of last year, GoDaddy took down entire computer security website—delisting it from DNS—to get a single, archived mailing list post off the web.

On that occasion, at least, it gave the site’s owner 60 seconds notice. GoDaddy notified Seto by posting its “Oops!” message to his public website.

“You put on my website for me to call you, when you have my phone number?,” says Sesto.

Gideon says the irony’s coming in buckets:

Curiously, police agencies have no problem with Cops Writing Cops, which is a site for cops to trash other cops for not showing them “professional courtesy”.

So a website where cops can complain about, essentially, getting ticketed, arrested and charged for breaking the law is okay, but a website where the public they serve does that is unacceptable.

I conclude in agreement with Radley:

The good news is, the site’s back up, now, though it isn’t clear who’s hosting it.

Me, I think police departments should be required to post all citizen complaints against individual officers online in a searchable database.  Individual officers, their union reps, or their departments could post responses or explanations to frivolous claims. Police officers are public servants.  Not only that, they’re public servants with the power to arrest, detain, and use lethal force.  If certain officers are the subject of repeated complaints and aren’t being properly investigated internally, the public ought to be informed of that.  This culture of secrecy—and of intimidating anyone who dares question it—isn’t healthy.

And further agreement with Threat Level’s Kevin Poulsen’s prediction that:

A year from now RateMyCop.com will have won public service awards. Good cops, and clean departments, will have come to think of the site as a friend, and its founders will be sought-after speakers at police gatherings.  Hosting companies that reject them on “health and safety” grounds will look like fools and cowards.

If they want to waste their time with legislation, bring it on. Such legislation, says Poulsen, “wouldn’t pass constitutional muster in any court in America.”