Some Thoughts on the Police, Accountability and the Internet

I noticed a little piece on Wired's site about Go Daddy.com
removing a police watchdog/ rating website from its server.
The rationale they used was, "This may endanger the
police officers". Kevin Poulsen of Wired writes,

A new web service that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community is scrambling to restore service Tuesday, after hosting company GoDaddy unceremonious pulled-the-plug on the site in the wake of outrage from criticism-leery cops.

Visitors to RateMyCop.com on Tuesday were redirected to a GoDaddy page reading, "Oops!!!", which urged the site owner to contact GoDaddy to find out why the company pulled the plug.

RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he'd been shut down for "suspicious activity."

When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. "How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,00 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?"

Police departments became uneasy about RateMyCop's plans to watch the watchers in January, when the Culver City, California, startup began issuing public information requests for lists of uniformed officers.

Then the site went live on February 28th. It stores the names and, in some cases, badge numbers of over 140,000 cops in as many as 500 police departments, and allows users to post comments about police they've interacted with, and rate them. The site garnered media interest this week as cops around the country complained that they'd be put at risk if their names were on the internet.

The entire time I am thinking of how information
gathering, contribution and distribution is incredibly powerful.

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Then I thought of this video of a police officer tasering a man
and thought hmmm, I wonder what the CEO of GoDaddy would
think if the tasered man were his son.
(sh-t hits the fan @ 2:41seconds)



His wifes screams are heartbreaking.

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I wonder what the CEO of GoDaddy would think if his daughter
was the woman assulted in a housing project on Thursday morning
in Brooklyn, on a night where two police officers lied about making
their rounds:

In investigating the rape, detectives from the housing bureau spoke to two officers who said they were doing “vertical patrols,” walking up and down the stairwells of the building, at the time of the attack and had marked it in their memo books. But investigators who reviewed the videotaped images found no evidence of the officers’ being there.

As a result, the officers, whose names were not released, were placed on modified assignment on Thursday and stripped of their guns and badges, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. The investigation of the police officers was reported on Friday in The Daily News.

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Any interactions with officers lately?

Thoughts, reactions?

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