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Timothy Lee and Jim Lippard today both touched on a topic that’s very near and dear to my heart - better government accountability through better technology.  There is a site entitled Rate My Cop that is apparently coming under fire from the Arizona police departments who consider the site an invasion of officers’ privacy.  The site doesn’t include any personally identifiable infomration like pictures, addresses or personal data other than the names of the officers and the department they work for.

Still, though, the Tempe police department is livid.

“If everybody went home everyday and you had the whole world ranking your job, we do make mistakes, but other days we do great things,” said one Tempe police officer.

Here’s how the site describes itself:

Welcome to RATEMYCOP.com, the online watchdog organization serving communities nationwide. RATEMYCOP.com is not affiliated with any government agency; we are an independent, privately managed organization.

Our mission is to compile information on cops' performance and to provide a forum where users can freely share individual accounts. Good, bad or indifferent. Most of all, we would like to hear your stories. Your appreciation and your disapproval. Did you witness a cop doing a good deed, or were you involved in an unfortunate altercation? Tell us about it. Tell others about it. Let it out. Don't feel intimidated by the badge to remain quiet.

While we respect their authority we are also free to question it. You have the right to remain informed.

This is what I see as a healthy example of governmental transparency, even though it is being done by way of citizen involvement, rather than through voluntary governmental action. As Techdirt’s Timothy Lee notes, “When a police officer screws up, the result can be innocent people being harrassed, humiliated, arrested, injured or killed.”

The bottom line is that as American citizens, our tax dollars pay these generally brave men and women’s salaries. As their employers and as American citizens, we deserve and are engage our rights to free speech in talking and chronicling publicly their actions.  Not only should they be held to a higher level of accountability, as Lee notes, but as Wendell Phillips famously quipped, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people.”

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