Police Feedback

A small, privately held company in the Los Angeles area had its website taken down by the authorities yesterday because police feared it placed them "in danger."

The website, ratemycop.com, contained the names and badge numbers of police officers of local, state, and federal police agencies. Visitors to the site would "rate" the performance of a particular police officer and supply feedback via the website. All information provided was public knowledge, and no personal information (i.e. address, phone numbers, etc.) of the police officers was allowed.

The website served as a "customer service" guide for individuals who had had run-ins with the law. Depending on your experiences with area law enforcement, you were free to either rant or rave about the police officer's performance. Now the website is defunct, and why should we be surprised?

Heroic websites, such as The Consumerist and GetHuman, serve as invaluable tools for educating shoppers about the products they buy, often times before they buy them. GetHuman.com is a website dedicated wholly towards, well, getting a human on the phone when you call a company's customer service department. Who wouldn't use that website when faced with the daunting task of calling Comcast, for example? There are scores of stories on Consumerist about improperly stocked stores, bad customer service, etc. as well as praise for stores providing good experiences. You'd be foolish to not check out that site before supporting a particular store, right?

The point is, these websites (consumerist and gethuman being only two examples) not only help consumers, but they also help vendors better serve their customers. Why, then, the exception to the transparency rule when it comes to police officers?

Police officers are, by definition, public servants. Their job is to protect and serve, not to hide behind a veil of secrecy because they feel threatened by a particular website. If the owner/CEO of Target, for example, felt threatened by the Consumerist, would he or she have the right to petition the Internet police to remove the site? I think not. So why should the special privilege be granted to the police?

A common fallacy regarding the police is that the police need special privileges in order to fulfill their obligation to protect you and me. This idea is demonstrably false if you believe that no group--including police--should be granted special rights by virtue of being a member of that particular group. In other words, a police officer has no more rights by virtue of being a cop than I do as an individual. To assign rights to people based on which group(s) they belong to is an old collectivist principle that has its roots in refusing to view each person as an individual. Such belief systems, often formed under the guise of fighting racism, sexism, etc. achieve precisely the opposite of their stated goals by creating an environment of confusing entitlements and special privilege. Equality and freedom are instead achieved through the defense of individual liberty.

I applaud the creator of ratemycop.com for his or her innovative approach to better inform everyone of the performance of police officers in communities across the United States. If my above logic fails to convince you that the police's reasoning is flawed regarding their support for the removal of the site, perhaps it would be better for me to fight fire with fire and steal a page from today's "accepted" police logic: if the police have nothing to hide regarding their performance, why are they scared?