Over a portion of last year, I closely covered the story of a website launched to track and rate the activities of uniformed peace officers. The site is called RateMyCop, and it’s a sort of Yelp for police officers.  The controversy around the site began around March 10th back in 2008, when the Tempe, Arizona police department took exception to fact that their officers were catalogued there.

The complained to the host of RateMyCop at the time, GoDaddy, who pulled the site, claiming it violated the terms of service somehow. This caused no small user revolt amongst GoDaddy’s userbase, but the fact was that the site contained no personally identifiable information about the police officials from Tempe or any other city – only their names and user ratings.

Indeed, most of the ratings within RateMyCop to this day continue to be positive ratings, as was evidenced by a particularly well publicized example from Los Angeles in late March last year.

See My 2008 Coverage of RateMyCop

• RateMyCop: Invasion of Privacy or Expression of Free Speech?
• GoDaddy Pulls the Plug on RateMyCop
• GoDaddy: You Don’t Like Them. Can They Redeem Themselves?
• RateMyCop: Not Just for Negativity

Turn the page to the fascinating case of Elisha Strom

Elisha Strom is, according to WaPo, a 34-year-old mother of a 12-year-old girl who was arrested for blogging about the police.

Of course the story takes more twists and turns, and the devil is in the details, but the gist of it seems to be that the young lady was motivated by a combination of romantic entanglement and distrust of the drug enforcement division of the Charlottesville police department. Blog post topics range from the cuteness factor of various cops to disclosure of home addresses and Google Street View snapshots of their homes.

It doesn’t help Ms. Strom’s case that she’s involved in the local White Power movement, and her ex-husband is a reportedly a convicted pedophile.

The question of this case is whether or not her actions, which seem limited to researching publicly available information and posting it on her blog, should be viewed as illegal. This woman took public information gathered it together. A case can be made, though, that she put their lives, and the their family’s lives in jeopardy in doing so.

There is a lot of generalized information out there about nearly everyone. This isn’t a flaw, it is our society. In general it is a good thing. However what can be used for good can also be used for bad. 

The Jack Boot is On The Other Foot

There is no question that our law enforcement system has serious flaws, and shining sunlight on it can create societal pressure for it to be improved.  That is one of the central themes of Government 2.0.

A number of clichés used by law enforcement come to mind in this particular case… "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear…" and "You don’t have an inherent right to privacy…" and "There’s no such thing as privacy in public areas…"

It is true that no citizen has an inherent right to privacy, but we all have an assumed sense of privacy since up until recently we’ve been living in an age where all the details of our lives haven’t been readily available to any who might inquire.

If I or someone else made a threatening statement to you over the Internet and you likely won’t care much. If I were to use your ID, to track you down using Google, Google Maps, and started posting pictures of your home, your wife and kids, on my blog and then threatened you, your attitude would be very likely to change in a hurry.

The police have had and exercised their ability to utilize this sort of tracking through law enforcement tools for quite some time, with access to license plate records, cell phone records, Internet access records, not to mention cameras on the streets, intersections, toll booths, ATMs and convenience stores. All that information is being recorded at all times and is at law enforcement fingertips.

For the first time in history, the shoe (or jack boot, if you will) is truly on the other foot.

It is a bit of interesting semantics we play when we societally determine it to be acceptable for our government to do to us, yet stalking when we track our government doing it to us.

Make No Mistake: Law Enforcement Needs Sunlight

 
I’ve said publicly many times that I’ve never had a positive experience with law enforcement – though as of about a month ago, I’ve had to change that tune.  In a long and convoluted experience with the Farmer’s Branch city code inspector, a simple visit from three uniformed officers cleared up what could have been a very painful legal battle.

Up until that point, though, all my experiences with uniformed peace officers have shown me just how bureaucratically entrenched they are in a do-nothing mindset, how corrupt they are with power, or how Napoleon-complex their mind has twisted into.

Aside from my little world, though, the incident that led to the recent “Obama Beer Summit” is a pretty decent instance where we can see how being disrespectful to a uniform gets elevated to the crime of interfering with the duties of a police officer. Policemen are armed with training, weapons, protective vests and cynical attitudes, yet they’re unable to combat being called into unflattering light with words in person or online?

They seem to think they deserve a special right to privacy that none of the rest of us are afforded.  They are employees of the people, but does that give us the right to forensically inspect their lives? Does it give them the right to inspect ours?

I don’t ask these questions to lead a point or be cute – I’m struggling with the question as well. Do you have a definitive answer?