Copping to It

As I've written before in this blog, anonymous user-generated content is being collected and indexed about a number of figures of authority, since students can rate their professors and lawyers can rate their judges. Now comes RateMyCop.com, which allows those who have had run-ins with the law to search for an officer by name, badge or employee number, department, or state and to "review the interaction you had with an officer" after the fact. You can also give your cop of choice a variable number of appropriately six-pointed sheriff-style stars.

However, none of the cops I knew personally were in the database, so it was difficult to gauge how the system worked. I did notice that there seemed to be some hoax names and gag accounts of fanciful arrests, but there were also a number of testimonials to sensitive policing in abuse cases and responsiveness to the needs of a community, hopefully not submitted by the officers' loved ones.

(I learned about this website from the radio show Digital Village on KPFK.)