TheAgitator.com
The RateMyCop Saga
Friday, March 14th, 2008So 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 the site 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.
Last week, it all got weirder. Hosting service GoDaddy mysteriously terminated Sesto’s account, and pulled RateMyCop.com offline. GoDaddy has offered several explanations to Wired’s ThreatLevel blog, but thus far, none of them have made much sense. Sesto gave up on GoDaddy, and next tried to get the site hosted at RackSpace. They turned him down. After initial accepting his down payment for hosting services, a RackSpace lawyer sent a letter to Sesto stating that, "We believe that the website to be found at www.ratemycop.com as described to our sales representative could create a risk to the health and safety of law enforcement officers."
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.
The good news is, the site’s back up, now, though it isn’t clear who’s hosting it.
Link just gives me a Page Not Found. I guess another hosting service got cold feet. Or threat of a lawsuit.
Hmmm, interesting. A Whois for the site’s IP still shows GoDaddy as the host.
Looked like it was up
http://ratemycop.com
One of the advertisers had an ad for….a career in law enforcement.
BTW, I dunno if this rating system will work. In looking at some of the rating comments, I see names like “PPonyou” and “RichardCranium” who try and trump the ratings with false positives. Anyone can rate anyone, regardless of actual interaction. Looks like it will just be a trove of lurkers, flame-baiters, and people generally trying to muck things up. *sigh*
RMC doesn’t seem to have any listings for Memphis, TN or its suburbs. That’s a shame.
What troubles me is the increasing amount of unmarked cars with blacked out windows here (and sometimes civilian plates). These officers speed through the city completely unaccountable to the public.
It appears to be gone now.
I think it’s funny that if I got stopped for DUI, before I was even found guilty my name and address would be in the paper for all to read, but God forbid you even mention a cop’s name.
That’s why I’m no fan of cops. I view them in the same league as lawyers. A necessary evil.
Weird. No, I am on a different machine with obviously a different browser cache’, and the site is still there. I wonder if it may be getting some attacks, like Denial-of-Service types. It is definitely a target.
I did a post on RMC. Texas Prosecutors hate RMC, and Open Records for that matter.
http://www.dallascriminaldefenselawyerblog.com/
Looks like it’s registered to name.com. Not surprising that GoDaddy dropped it, Bob Parsons is known for making decisions like that.
GoDaddy has been pretty spineless during all of this. I hope people remember.
[...] Radley Balko reports on the ups and downs of RateMyCop.com. And then people wonder why I don’t trust the police. Also from Balko, [...]
I keep getting a 404, page not found error.
Just checked…site still up…Hmmmm….
[...] for the police officers in their community. As you might have guessed, this site has generated some controversy, but it’s still up, and I definitely think it can be a good instrument for improving [...]
I’m seeing a 404 as well … the image on the 404 page is one of GoDaddy’s: http://images.godaddy.com/hosting/hdr_sorry_small.gif
I suspect this isn’t duplicity. The updates to the domain name may not have propagated throughout the Internet yet, so some DNS servers are returning the old address still. That should change within a couple days at most.
LOL, i am seeing a “Loving Family Dollhouses” when i try to load it.
It came right up for me, a few minutes ago.
I despair of its ever working well, just because of the anonymity. Any doodah or malicious person can just make something up, and post it.
Actual balls may be required to make it work, as in, “My True Name is so-and-so and Officer so-and-so did this bad (or good) act in my presence on such-and-such date.”
Maybe encrypted digital signatures would help, here?
Hell, if the site is still up on April 1st, I can see policemen using it to annoy each other.
Cops are famous for having a low nasty sense of humor.
I emailed the site about my concerns and they responded saying that they were going to improve the website experience…we’ll see.
Hey, if they aren’t doing anything wrong they have nothing to worry about. Right? Right…..?
jac | March 15th, 2008 at 6:36 am
Hey, if they aren’t doing anything wrong they have nothing to worry about. Right? Right…..?
Exactly. If you have nothing to hide why are you worried about surveillance?
It will be interesting when the tech is available for the average citizen to record their experiences, will be there be a site like ratemycop.com to upload the video? Will the government manage to quash them?
There is so much hope for humanity, and so much despair.
I wish i knew y some of u can view this site and all i get is a site selling stuff for doll houses. :(
Right now the ip addres resolves to: 205.234.222.18
You can plug this into arin.net’s whois database to figure out who’s responsible for that ip address. This is the result:
I’m not familiar with “server central network” but that’s who it is. Here is there webpage: http://www.servercentral.net/
Be dandy.
Good to see I’m not the only one who is getting the dollhouse site when they go there. (shrugs)
It’s about time somthing like this site happened. These self important little piss ant local town and county wanna be cops need reigned in. If ya can’t cut it to be a real cop like a state trooper, just fill out an application and be a local cop then strut around with all the equipment belted on, including the gun and act like you are somebody.
Seriously? I would have thought that this was all too obvious by now.