RateOurCops – Like Yelp, but for Cops
rateourcops.org
rateourcops.org
Legislation along the lines of anti-SLAPP laws could help, making the plaintiff pay for a failed action. But the political power of the police makes that unlikely, and if not narrowly tailored would discourage even well founded suits by plaintiffs with shallow pockets.
https://kfor.com/news/oklahoma-legislature/controversial-ant... [2021]
>"Governor Kevin Stitt today signed into law House Bill 1643, a bill that makes it crime to dox, or post personal information, of law enforcement and county officials online."
Sure, it's egregiously unconstitutional; but just as you say, I wouldn't want to be the one hiring attorneys.
~~~~~
[late edit]: To defend of my assertion of "egregiously unconsitutional", I'll quote this succinct summary of the enumerated First Amendment exceptions in United States v. Stevens [2010], as summarized in Rynearson v. Ferguson. I can't imagine how any of these could even loosely apply here; please correct my misunderstandings if you are able. (For those Googling things, be warned that Stevens is a very disturbing case).
> Over the years, the Supreme Court has enumerated certain “well-defined and narrowly limited’ classes of speech that remain unprotected by the First Amendment. See Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 571-72 (1949). The unprotected speech is limited to, (a) obscenity, Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476; (b) defamation, Beauharnais v. Illinois, 343 U.S. 250, 254-255 (1952); (c) fraud, Virginia Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., 425 U.S. 748 (1976); (d) incitement, Brandenbury v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 447-49 (1969); (e) true threats, Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705 (1969); and (f) speech integral to criminal conduct, Giboney v. Expire Storate & Ice Co., 336 U.S. 490, 498 (1949). Speech that does not fall into these exceptions remains protected. See United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460 (2010).
https://www.eff.org/files/2019/02/22/order_granting_pi.pdf
Here's a longer (two page PDF) summary of the same, glossing some definitions:
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11072 [.pdf]
How is it unconstitutional exactly? People seem to throw that term around willy-nilly. It is, however, problematic because it overreaches -- for example, being expected to blur out badge numbers or officer names is needlessly onerous for the reporter of a police encounter.
This combination in effect turns into a requirement to either not film, or not post videos of cops, which is unconstitutional.
Just to be clear, you're not allowed to post videos of plenty of things (Area-51, a meeting between the Joint Chiefs, closed sessions in Congress, etc.). But you're right that you're allowed to record videos of cops in public[1]. I think the law in question is about personally-identifiable information.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#...
2. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/you-have-first-amendme...
I suppose the Supreme Court will have to rule on the issue of blurring our badge numbers during the course of a protected activity.
But this does seem related to the constitution through the First Amendment.
One of the more sane elevated rights police officers have long enjoyed is the right to extreme privacy - their phone numbers and addresses are unlisted by default and sharing the private information of an officer with malicious intent carries a more serious penalty than an equivalent action against a regular individual. Police officers face an elevated level of danger in their personal lives from persons they've arrested or interacted with - if you could spin this website as providing information that makes it easier to identify and harass problematic officers (even if they deserve a significant amount of scrutiny) you'll likely have a strong case to have the site shutdown.
Most people these days seem to be confused about what the term "secret police" means. It doesn't mean a police forces that the public don't know exists. It means a police force that has as some of its members, people whos identities are secret. You know, like the NKVD or STASI.
I was taught as a kid 30 years ago, during the cold war, that having a secret police was a key indicator of an oppressive regime. What you describe as "sane elevated rights" was something I was taught that we needed to fight tooth and nail, possibly with nuclear weapons.
I guess times change. Sometimes I feel like crying.
They're not elected, nor are they "public persons." There are plenty of regular folks working for the city, including analysts, beat cops, secretaries, and so on.
This is extremely reductive.
Who said they were?
> nor are they public
They work in the public sector. That's what 'public' means.
Really? A public profile for all... military personnel. FBI, CIA, NSA employees, government contractors, employees of corporation that accepts government subsidies/grants.
Yes, unless there's some kind of security exemption then names can be anonymised. I don't think most police are doing that kind of work though?
Why do you think that's controversial? It's public money.
> government contractors, employees of corporation
The contract details should be in scope, but what the person with that contract chooses to do with that money (paying employees) is up to them and should be private.
No, in the context of the First Amendment, that is emphatically not what it means. Where did you go to law school?
As a non-elected “regular folk” kind of person working for a state government (not city, but Constitutionally there is no distinction) a lot of my employment information that would not be public (and that both I and my employer might seek to protect, or different reasons, from the public were I privately employed) is public. Not just in a theoretic sense, but actually hosted and searchable by anyone in the world in numerous databases compiled by media organizations of public data.
Working for the government, outside of where the fact or nature of that employment is itself, say, classified information, is very much a “public” thing.
Police officers get a number of special treatments that empower them with more and less rights in certain settings due to the specific nature of their job.
https://www.jmllaw.com/blog/keep-mind-9-rules-of-filming-pol...
https://www.solutionlawapc.com/criminal-defense/the-right-to...
https://www.vjamesdesimonelaw.com/can-you-film-police-when-s...
There was even a bill passed in 2015 (still in effect) that affirmatively declared a right to record: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
Your comment is extremely poorly worded with the recent and historical explosion of derision against black people, etc.
Very poor choice of words. :(
I mean the Supreme Court just threw out the donor disclosure requirement in CA because it could have the effect of stifling free speech.
> "Governor Kevin Stitt today signed into law House Bill 1643, a bill that makes it crime to dox, or post personal information, of law enforcement and county officials online."
I'm not going to try to judge how wacky that law may be, but this website definitely isn't doxxing:
1. Police officers are public employees, and often a lot of seemingly "personal information" is actually a matter of public record (e.g. salaries). The "personal information" on this website appears to be publicly available (e.g. I found this guy at random https://rateourcops.org/officer/26, it lists a phone number which Google reveals to be on his employer's website https://www.cityofalbertlea.org/contact-us/, so likely an official work number).
2. It cannot be doxxing to truthfully describe your personal experiences with a person (e.g. this cop treated me badly in this way, or I think he only did a one star job).
We all thought what Aaron Swartz was doing was clearly not under the purview of the CFAA, but he got hounded to his death by a prosecutor over it anyways.
I would not want to risk it here.
And I don't believe for one second that only bad police officers will be harassed. There are actual criminals who'd do it. There are activists who would like to get back at cops for doing things like voting for the wrong candidate, or who just aren't good at picking the correct cop to target at all. There are teenagers who'd call the cops' landlord with complaints just for the lulz.
Perhaps a good example of how far such a legal theory can be pushed is the case of isoHunt, a search engine which was shut down in 2013 after being sued by the MPAA.
> The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in March ruled against isoHunt, concluding that “there is more than enough unrebutted evidence in the summary judgment record to prove Fung offered his services with the object of promoting their use to infringe copyrighted material.”
https://variety.com/2013/biz/news/isohunt-to-shut-down-as-pa...
Just because something doesn't hold up to judicial scrutiny doesn't stop TX from passing anti-abortion laws all the time and making it very difficult for women.
There is no algorithm for truth, so in practice you need a way of allowing groups to form consensus about the validity of claims relating to pieces of data in the system. A claim might be "The image with hash ABC123 is a deepfake."
It might be possible to layer a system with that amount of nuance on top of a blockchain, but you need to be really careful that your system won't end up making the world much worse before it has a chance of making it better.
If you know that a specific cop is going to be at a specific location at a specific time, you could create the deepfake in advance and add it to the blockchain when they show up.
Section 230 of the CDA shields operators of interactive computer services from liability for user-generated content. Interactive computer services are not liable for what users do with them.
A personal blog where you post your own content, however, could open you up to libel or SLAPP lawsuits.
Until one of the crusades to legislatively narrow or repeal Section 230 succeeds, that should be pretty complete protection against even a scintilla of a cognizable libel claim against the developer for user-submitted content.
States attempting criminalization of posting police related info are a bigger threat (while mostly blatantly federally unconstitutional, there's a significant risk of you being arrested, tried, convicted, and serving a sentence before you get that argument even taken up by a federal court.)
Sesta/Fosta is already law. It has already started.
If one fears the misuse of power by the government through the judiciary, then needs to rally the politicians and political party to their cause too, and work from within the system.
It however doesn't change what I said.
When fighting political causes, anonymity doesn't help - Gandhi or Rosa Park or Martin Luther King continue to inspire us today because they faced injustice and tyranny head on. They have provided us with an effective template to fight against injustice and assert our rights.
Fear is often the reason behind anonymity, and that doesn't bode well for any political cause. Even Gandhi, who inspired non-violent politics said that he would prefer if people chose violent politics than giving in to fear or cowardice ( https://www.mkgandhi.org/nonviolence/phil8.htm ). Moreover, politics on internet is even more fraught as even foreign powers can hide behind anonymity to interfere in the politics of other nations.
What I'm saying is that there absolutely are reasons.
This is also not a binary proposition. In a group of activists you can have some people working anonymously and some people working out in the open.
As these ratings have no bearing on whether police keep their jobs, whether a civilian interacts with a given cop, whether a given cop is promoted, or anything else, all this really does is serve as a platform to shit talk the police. Now, there are definitely some police who deserve to be called out for inappropriate behavior, but doing it on the internet really won't do any good.
As this comment will have no bearing on whether the website will have its intended effect, whether anyone uses the website, whether public records of negative interactions will spur reform, or anything else, all this comment really does is serve as a platform to shit talk the website. Now, there are definitely some websites that deserve to be called out for not achieving the effect of full scale, immediate nationwide police reform, but commenting about it on Hacker News really won't do any good.
None of those involved an expected naturally unhappy party.
Most local communities are not going to do that for reasons largely due to macro policies (which have positive effects too; eg labor mobility is harmful to local communities but well worth the cost).
Not sure that's going to work any better than what we don't have now.
Your open source cop tracker for local communities idea sounds cool. Go build it.
Link: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/crowdsource-police-reviews-...
What should citizens do when the government and official capacities are completely failing to hold police accountable?
In Seattle our Office of Police Accountability is a blind rubber stamping agency that our OIG recently reprimanded for their abysmal failures in investigating an incident with a lot of public intention.
https://southseattleemerald.com/2021/06/30/oig-memo-reveals-...
(For the record, I do fund the 3 city council members who are toughest on police accountability. And our city council is moving in the right direction on police accountability - the mayor is the biggest obstacle)
Living under a good government isn’t some naturally free good we deserve to be given; we collectively create it, and if you aren’t contributing to that, then like most people, you are freeloading on someone else’s work to make it happen.
“I vote” is better than nothing, but less than the minimum average contribution required to make it work.
k.
Replace their governments. Ideally, at the ballot box.
2: Threats (against cops)
3: False claims
4: False sense of authority (people reporting to me)
It was years ago, i've forgotten lots of the issues.
This is great from a privacy perspective, but how do they prevent false reviews?
Yelp collects personal information upon signup and they still have a fake review problem.
Seems... not good.
Yelp and online business review sites provide value on the basis that you can make educated choices, but there is no choice involved with police. You don't get to pick and choose which officers or departments are coming, and if someone calls the police on you you're not not going to be have the time or knowledge of who's being sent to search on RateOurCops before they get there. It's a fallacy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/16/what-happ...
Given the official reticence to hold officers to even the lowest standards of professionalism, what is your alternative? Throw up our collective hands?
That idiom doesn't make sense to me in this context, there's no cultural issue or whatnot. It's about seeing how unverified claims can hurt people, which you don't need a crystal ball or peer reviewed study to tell you. It's also about the burden of proof - why do I need to point to tons of instances of these kinds of sites ruining innocent people's lives, but we should all expect what's posted here to be true without 'evidence'?
> There's mountains of evidence of how bad cops are protected by the union, the government policy, and even legally (hello qualified immunity, and repeated court deference).
"The police" are not some monolithic entity, with one single union or one single government, at least in the United States which this site is obviously directed at. Different unions and departments conduct themselves differently, and a lot of them don't have these problems.
> Given the official reticence to hold officers to even the lowest standards of professionalism, what is your alternative? Throw up our collective hands?
This is another fallacy - people that see the obvious problems with unverified claims on the internet are not required to give you solutions to whatever problem the latest example website is claiming to help solve.
That being said, I can choose to answer that question as the separate topic it is. My answer is stronger hiring practices and when the rubber hits the road, federal enforcement. There are police departments that don't have these problems. Americans have civil rights and federal law enforcement is supposed to protect them, even and especially from state governments when those are violated. More money needs to be spent, and for a lot of departments they just need to wipe the force.
As for more money for police, isn’t that just rewarding bad behavior? Police are already some the largest expenditures for cities, and that’s even before you factor in all the payments for lawsuits for police misconduct. Police departments are unique in that you will find people arguing that more money needs to be spent on failing departments, whereas other government agencies, for instance schools, have their budgets cut for poor performance.
It is pearl clutching because you’re arguing that potential harm is somehow greater than the actual harm that is occurring every day. Not just occurring, but documented, publicized, and then pointed unpunished.
Just earlier this year, the 5th Circuit Court said it was reasonable for a police officer to recklessly immolate a man. You might say, it was unexpected that a cop would know that tasing a man that has doused himself in gasoline, would ignite it. But that doesn’t hold, because not only are the cops trained not use tasers around flammable liquids, BUT ANOTHER OFFICER ON SCENE said, “If we tase him, he’s going to light on fire.”
But, oh won’t someone think of the police?! Seriously. Think about the real harm, because the cops protect themselves. They act with complete impunity. And as for worrying of a cop gets dozed, let me tell you a secret. That information is already public records. There’s nothing special here than anyone else, except that you and I can’t kill someone and then say the magic words “I thought he had a gun”, and then get applauded as a hero.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2021/02/19/court-gr...
You don't get to pick and choose your kid's public school teachers, either. You can extend this to public schools, as well. You don't choose public schools your kid goes to in the same way you don't get to choose what department in your city responds to your call. And yet Rate My Teachers exists for public school teachers[1] all the same.
You can choose where you live and decide what schools or teachers you don't want your kid being around, in the same way you can choose where you live or travel to in order to avoid certain cops or police departments entirely.
RatemyTeachers has a privacy policy and at least attempts to verify people, telling viewers that despite their efforts they should take reviews with a grain of salt[1].
Also, you still have more options for schools due to private and charter schools. It's still not an equal comparison.
Where I live you do. You can put in a request to have your child go to another school, either in your district or even out of your district. Or enroll them in private school, or charter school, or, heck, home school them.
The difference is, doing this means you as a parent are on the hook for getting your child to these schools (and in the case of home school, teaching as well).
But just because something is inconvenient doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And these options mean you can put your child where they will excel.
Exactly. If I don't want to live or visit somewhere where I might encounter certain police officers or departments, I have the option of making that happen. And that option means my kid won't be on the wrong side of those particular people or departments abusing their power.
Sites like the OP give people that option.
This site only uses publicly available information. How would it enable more harassment if someone can goto www.agency.com/officers and get the same info?
A lot of police officers work a lot of overtime hours, for example in Oakland one officer averaged a half a million dollars per year. (1)
I’m not sure exactly what his hourly wage worked out to, but I’ll agree with the overall sentiment that somebody making that much money would not likely be swayed by $100.
1 https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-police-average-30-million-...
https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-police-officers-overwo...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2020/04/23/polic...
https://www.courant.com/breaking-news/hc-lender-police-pay-2...
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/07/03/police-departments-ha...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/15-portland-police-officers-see-l...
I’d personally be wary of extrapolating “this webpage says that some police officers that make less money than others” to “$100 is a significant amount of money for an average cop.”
Despite reading your articles, I still don't think $100/hr is a reasonable approximation of an average cop's hourly rate, and thats before getting into the fact that the guy making half a million for watching Warriors games is probably not the guy pulling you over.
I’ve personally never said that police make more than $100 per hour, in fact I specifically said that despite not knowing what the hourly wage works out to, I don’t think that $100 would be a significant amount of money to most cops.
If your premise is “you can bribe anyone as long as the dollar amount is higher than the wages from one hour of work,” then I suppose it’s impossible to discuss in good faith.
My premise is “$100 isn’t usually enough to bribe people that make high five figures or more.” I’m not entirely sure why hourly wage is supposed to fit in here.
Please read the original post I responded to. It explicitly mentions hourly wage which is the only reason I mentioned it at all. I thought their estimate seemed a little high.
Thank you for stating your premise, I didn't find it clear in your earlier posts. I don't have strong opinions about how much is enough to bribe someone who makes X as I am not aware of any good sources of data that deal with this question. Maybe a table of attempted bribes with metadata. I'll run some experiments and get back to you.
Based on a quick glance at some synopses, it seems the author accurate identifies the role of police in society but perhaps doesn't adequately account for how society would change if the police were removed but the driving force for their existence remained in place.
I’m kind of curious as to what you mean by this: > it seems the author accurate identifies the role of police in society but perhaps doesn't adequately account for how society would change if the police were removed but the driving force for their existence remained in place.
You believe that the author has a factual understanding of the current state of police, and at the same time is factually wrong about a hypothetical scenario that has never occurred in American history?
(As an aside, I’m not sure what the synopses have led you to believe Vitale is directly advocating for. It’s a very complex book with a lot of nuance. If one’s interpretation is “this is the same exact thing as a ‘defund the police’ or ‘black lives matter’ or ‘coexist’ bumper sticker” then there isn’t really much that can be done to change that opinion.)
What authors do you think are correct about a hypothetical future in which something completely unprecedented happens to American society?
I haven't the book and it will take me several months to get to it, so I'd appreciate if you didn't pull random concrete ideas out of my intentionally vague and non-committal statement. Why is it that the people quickest to accuse others of bad faith are the ones that do this?
Clearly you meant something else, I apologize.
https://transparentnevada.com/salaries/search/?q=sergeant
Cops make a lot more than most people realize.
It's a good amount of money for a blue collar job, but I think you're overselling it, especially for HN.
You raise a valid point but it makes the analysis more complicated. Even given the way you run the numbers, however, I think you are still overestimating the hourly rate for the average cop. If you judge the wealth of the world by the top 10%, poverty has been eliminated.
There was a bigger number that included all the benefits and perks, and a smaller number that represented actual weekly take-home pay. I was able to divide the bigger number by 40 just as easily as I was able to divide the smaller number by 40.
I guess I’m the only one to do that? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The premise seems to be that if the police made $99/hr, you could easily get better services out of them by handing them a $100 bill, because then they’d make an extra dollar. However if they are making $100/hr, they’d become morally unassailable at that price point.
It’s a somewhat odd argument because instead of responding to a somewhat flippant comment about what it would take to have better interactions with law enforcement, we’re now arguing about hourly wages. It’s a pretty neat way to avoid addressing the actual issue at hand.
Deputy Jason Wood is the sort of shitty cop that I would like to avoid based on his poor ratings from interactions with my community. He can be heard in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc4iEjycDCw repeatedly urging his dog to attack a suspect who was on his knees with his hands in the air. He subsequently got a DUI https://mynews4.com/news/local/washoe-county-deputy-charged-.... Deputy Jason Wood is still a Washoe County Sheriff's deputy today, and indeed has been promoted since those incidents. We paid him $242,000 https://transparentnevada.com/salaries/2020/washoe/jason-d-w... in total compensation last year - plus we paid the guy in that video $17,500 for the mauling and beating.
He also shot a guy to death in 2014, but there was no video of that and police investigated themselves and determined that there was no wrongdoing.
If you want to do some naive math, $242k divided by 40hr/week divided by 52 weeks/year is $116/hr in total compensation.
Oh he got a second DUI this year too.
There's no denying being a senior cop is a good gig, but probably the gig of an average cop is a little more mundane. In many municipalities the highest paid public sector employee is a cop, but only a very small number of cops reach this status.
[1] https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_s...
Forbes-via-BLS reports $89k average for the same time period, but it seems they are not including overtime. A ~20% increase in median pay from overtime is pretty substantial. It'd be interesting to see nominal and actual compared by state.
It's not about money, it's about power.
But I’m afraid the proposed solution may lead to doxxing and threatening of police officers and their family members, ie 2021 style mob rule.
The correct solution would be more legislation requiring police to disclose whatever it should disclose. The law should define the level of police transparency, not anonymous justice warriors.
Hwæt, weardmann! Hwæt is sēo ġedrēfednes?
I imagine the impetus for this comes from the widespread accounts of cops that have long histories of abusive behavior and evidence tampering being tolerated and indeed covered up by the police. In fact in many states, disciplinary records are secret, and indeed there are moves in several states to make independently documenting abusive police encounters a criminal offense.
No self-respecting attorney would ever trust a third-party site with zero verification. You would literally get more accurate information from Twitter or Facebook.
> I imagine the impetus for this comes from the widespread accounts of cops that have long histories of abusive behavior and evidence tampering being tolerated and indeed covered up by the police.
All of these issues are only going to be correctly handled by legitimate authorities anyways, this site doesn't actually solve anything. Anything posted here can be safely ignored. If anything, this site's layout should just be translated to an official city's website for handling complaints, so that they can spend the money to use it and make it effective.
Of course they wouldn't, but now they have leads they can reach out to and verify. And if they want to give testimony, and the court will hear them, then they can do so under the threat of perjury.
> All of these issues are only going to be correctly handled by legitimate authorities anyways, this site doesn't actually solve anything
Except this hasn't been the case. There are plenty of examples of abuse of power by law enforcement being brushed under the rug by authorities until the public or their team of lawyers pressured them into doing something about it.
I don't know why you believe this, because there's mountains of evidence contradicting this very thought. A simple google search for "poilce misconduct" will give page after page of both studies and individual cases where officers were known be abusive or committing perjury or mishandling evidence and yet this this information remained secret, and the officer remained employed for decades.
For instance David Cimperman had a long history of comitting felonies, perjury, and evidence tampering, and yet he became the Chief of Police for Amsterdam, OH. In what world is this considered "correctly handled"?
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/0...
You’re kidding, right? They wouldn’t exist if people didn’t extract value out of them. I certainly have many, many, many times visited or hired businesses because of Yelp, and Aziz Ansari has an entire bit in this. Reviews are a backbone of much online commerce.
Of course even if Yelp were perfect or even good, it doesn't matter because this site is nothing like Yelp or RateMyProfessors, because there is no choice involved. It's not like you choose which officers or departments show up to your 911 call. If the police do show up, it's not like you check their RateOurCops score before they get to your door.
Hello, my name is bradlys. You've now met at least one person who has gone somewhere based on positive Yelp reviews.
I understand the problem this site is trying to address but I'm not sure this is the correct metric.
John - Dicks around on HackerNews all day and doesn't get any work done. 1/5 stars, would not hire.
People don't only exist at one point in time, neither do interactions. I witnessed a woman start filming and getting in the officers faces long after it was evident that the person obviously needed to be taken out of the space. Maybe she posted it to her Instagram. Nobody's going to challenge that, even though she was more likely just trying to draw attention to herself and getting in the way.
Won't be perfect, but this seems worth trying.
I'm not so certain people will leave glowing positive reviews, or 4-star reviews of cops. "Fantastic service, the interior of the back of the car could have been more clean, I wish I could give this 3.5 stars."
Or, "Gave me directions when I was lost near 9th ave, looking the M&M store. Thanks! 5 stars."
But most likely, "Was rude, yelled at me, and then pushed me up against the wall. 1 star"
This idea is ridiculous. If you want a platform for civilian review, that does exist in some cities. Because, and this evidenced by some of the "how brave" comments below, this is really intended to punish bad cops and call them out. Calling this a Yelp is dishonest. If you want to be honest call it like it is, a complaint area.
In some cities there's a civilian review board, and there's a special section of the DA for investigating bad behavior and illegal behavior. The role of the cop is to enforce laws. Will this idea make them more accountable to those things, or does it exist to create mayhem using technology and an online platform for doxxing? That's not a rhetorical question - it's an honest question and I'm curious what people believe.
A restaurant provides a service in exchange for a payment. A police officer is taught to uphold the law, and interactions with the citizenry isn't like a hotelier interacting with a guest after a flight.
I'm not justifying anything the police do, or excusing anything. The case I'm making is that the metaphor of Yelp and service are just wrong. In the U.S., at least. And certainly in big cities. It's no picnic being on either side of the police-citizen interaction.
I was in Texas recently and saw first hand what it looks like when police enforce 0 traffic laws. It ain't pretty.
You need to have legal counsel right now. You can't wait until you've been served. At that point it will be too late.
So what's the actual utility of this service? Those who have good experiences with cops will ignore it and not use it, while a small number of vocal and dedicated persons with an axe to grind may use it. At best, it will provide a biased perspective and open up avenues of abuse.
That may be true, but I can't help imagining a good cop seeing this and saying "Hey, that's not fair, you're watching us all the time, collecting all this information in a permanent record, just waiting to portray something innocent in a negative light and requiring us to clear our names." to which the response of the average citizens should be, "Right, now do you see why mass surveillance is bad?"
You know, they may turn out to be more correct than they intended...
I guess LinkedIn fits the bill better.
I can understand that people want to hold police accountable for their actions but I don't think this is the way to do it.
> Considering Chicago is the most violent city in America , the police are way too lenient and practice more social justice than they do law enforcement. The scale of punishment vs reward is way off. The revolving door of crime also known as recidivism is out of control. They spend too much money, time, and effort on policing the police than prosecuting forcible felons, including; pedophiles, murderers, and other heinous crimes. Ever since they have gone overboard with watchdog groups over emphasizing everything the police do wrong 1% of the time the crime had skyrocketed. I highly recommend you utilize your tech savvy rating blog to create charts and graphs comparing depolicing, lack of prosecution, and crime. You will find that this marxist agenda tool is the cause of the priblem a d not law enforcement. I therefore give the Chicago Police Deparment 5 stars and Communism no stars. Peace be with you. I pray to Jesus.
What 'type' is this?
I'm not sure why you would consider an unhinged stream of emotional bullshit to have anything to do with "working class".
You literally did the same thing you accused that reviewer of doing, except from the opposite side of the aisle.
It's likely the reviewer probably thinks you are batshit crazy.
I think it's fairly likely you're both sane.
"Communism good, police bad, the problem is police not crime. And Black Lives Matter."
Something like "Seargent Smith seems quite competent: he told me that I had Japanese cloned consciousnesses in my head and that it was terminal - 4/5 stars".
Or "Detective Samantha of NJU lacked imagination and just thought I was screwed in the head, self-incriminating and wanted attention when I clearly wanted someone to 'clean house' again in my head - 2/5 stars"
Or "Officer Breen seemed to despise me, as he took notes on his Panasonic Toughbook without an ounce of thought - 3/5 stars".
Or "Did an obese redditor just upset the Japanese empire again?"