RateMyCop takedown sparks debate over speech, privacy

By Jacqui Cheng

"I was walking down the street, when Officer Morgan jumped out from behind some bushes. He was in full tactical gear and had tree branches affixed to his helmet. He had an AR15 pointed at me, screaming about marijuana, and asking where the nickel bags were. I told him that I was a Muslim, and had never even tried marijuana."

That's just one of many comments posted on RateMyCop.com, a two-week-old site that has sparked debate across the Internet about privacy, freedom of speech, and the role of service providers. The site's purpose is to provide a public forum for anonymous citizens to offer comments about police officers, which would theoretically hold the cops more "responsible" for their actions to the public.

RateMyCop has not been received well by the law enforcement community, which voiced its concerns almost immediately. "Officers who are rated face unfair maligning without any opportunity to defend themselves," said California Police Chiefs Association president Chief Jerry Dyer, quoted by PoliceOne.

"Will they be able to access our home addresses, our home phone numbers, our marital status, whether or not we have children?" asked Kevin Martin, VP of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, according to ABC.

In fact, the site's owners have attempted to address both of those issues. First, the site does not index police officers that are undercover, and posting their personal information is against RateMyCop's Terms of Service (looking through the various comments, a number of posts have been marked as being edited by moderators). Cops can also register themselves and post responses to the comments, and site founder Gino Sesto told Wired that they would eventually be able to "authenticate" themselves as officers and post more prominent responses.

Still, that didn't stop the site's host from pulling the plug on RateMyCop earlier this week. On Tuesday, GoDaddy pulled down the site, allegedly without even contacting Sesto beforehand. When he contacted the company to find out why, he was first told that it was due to suspicious activity, and then later that he had crossed his 3TB bandwidth limit. With relatively resource-light pages and moderate traffic—Sesto told Wired that he had only gotten a few hundred thousand pageviews this week—the bandwidth explanation at first seemed unlikely.

But GoDaddy insisted to Ars that any accusations over censorship are unfounded and that Sesto would not resolve the bandwidth issue with the company. "GoDaddy's concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.... Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck," GoDaddy VP of public relations Elizabeth Driscoll told us. "The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue." The site is now back up (at another hosting company).

The entire incident has raised questions about the role that public criticism sites play. It's true that there is potential for abuse, but that potential exists in more than one way. For example, I checked the ratings for a number of the "top-rated" police offers, and one particular user (RICHARDCRANIUM) appears to have left five-star positive reviews for police officers across the entire country. Perhaps he does enough road trips and takes down the names of every officer he encounters so that he can leave such reviews, but otherwise, his glowing reviews for cops in multiple states come off as a bit fishy.

Overall, the comments left on RateMyCop seem relatively mild, and public commentary and criticism is staunchly protected by law. While cops talk about being threatened or targeted by having their information posted, that information is already public (which is how the site came by it in the first place).

Should police mount a legal challenge, there are a number of safe harbor laws that would likely protect Sesto from what users post on the site. The 1996 Communications Decency Act has been used in a number of similar cases, one of which related to discriminatory housing ads posted on Craigslist. The judge in that case ruled that Craigslist was not a "publisher" of housing ads, but merely a provider of online "interactive services," and was therefore not liable for the content of users' posts. Another judge ruled that Section 230 of the CDA protected users who reposted materials written by others, even if those materials constituted libel.

RateMyCop merely provides a means for regular people to voice their opinions and, other than enforcing the site's TOS, does not otherwise have involvement in what the users say. That doesn't mean that cops like anonymous criticism any more than teachers do, or that it's any more fair; "rate my teacher" sites have been around for years, though the combination of named teachers and anonymous commentators can sometimes get ugly. In the UK, for instance, teachers' unions have already complained about such sites and a French court has even ruled that the practice is illegal. Watching the watchers may become the latest activity to receive such scrutiny.

Update: The Fraternal Order of Police tells Ars that it was aware of the site but had taken no action to have it removed. That doesn't mean they like the idea of RateMyCop. "The FOP opposes any release of information that places officers' lives in danger," president Chuck Canterbury said. "We are very familiar with the first amendment and defend it vigorously but we also believe that officer safety must trump the public's right to know."