Friday, March 14, 2008

Who's Afraid of "Rate My Cop"?

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."

[ ... ]

In unadorned terms, the last thing police want is to be accountable to the communities they're supposed to be serving. Accordingly, police unions immediately began to shriek and keen that Rate My Cop posed a threat to ...

... wait for it ...

... wait for it ...

... that's right: "Officer safety."

I've said it before: "officer safety," not protection of the law-abiding public, is the highest priority of every police department, and every effort to reform police conduct or hold police publicly accountable is condemned as a threat to the same by the professional whiners who represent police unions.

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