Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Who's Afraid of "Rate My Cop"? (William Grigg)

William Grigg on the great "Rate My Cop" website and the thugs who want to shut it down:

Each week, if not every day, brings in its train another illustration of the fact that those who scrutinize us cannot abide reciprocal scrutiny. Witness the apparent demise of the "Rate My Cop" website.

Carly Kullman, a one-time police cadet, explains that Rate My Cop was to be a national database of police officers and agencies. Users would be able "to browse through their own local police department and see how their local police force stacks up" when compared to other agencies across the country. The site would deal only in publicly available information about agencies and individual officers. Each officer would be rated on the basis of three criteria: authority, fairness, and satisfaction.

Rebecca Costell, a creator of Rate My Cop, said that the objective was to combat an emerging stereotype of police as abusive, violence-prone revenue hogs: "Our website's purpose is to break that stereotype that people have that cops are all bad by having officers become responsible for their actions."

Read the rest

Note: See the website RateMyCop.com. There were reports that the site was taken down, but as if this writing it's up and running!

[UPDATE] See Carly Kullman's original article here (thanks Carly for the link in your comment!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, this is great. My name is plastered everywhere and parts of my article have been spread across the internet. Wooo hoooo.

Too bad nobody has a link to the real article that I posted.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/651775/to_serve_protect_rate_my_cop_offers.html

Minnesota Chris said...

Blog post updated :-)