Police watchdog website mysteriously shut down
Posted By David Markland On March 11, 2008 @ 6:58 pm In Crime | Comments Disabled
[1]RateMyCop.com [2], a Culver City based website allowing the public to review individual police officer performance, was pulled offline by webhost GoDaddy sometime on Tuesday.
Gino Testo, who started the site with his wife, told Wired’s Threat Level blog [3] that initially GoDaddy reps told him that the site was shut down for “suspicious activity,” but later told him the site had exceeded its enormous 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, causing Testo to call bullshit: “”How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,00 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?”
…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.
Undercover officers are not included in reports. Threat Level adds that GoDaddy “is known to be quick to censor its customers,” and when refused to comment for their story citing its privacy policy.
More information on RateMyCop at LA Cityzine [4] and Thrillist! [5]… photo by Mahalie [6] used under Creative Commons.
Related posts:
Article printed from Los Angeles Metblogs: http://la.metblogs.com
URL to article: http://la.metblogs.com/2008/03/11/police-watchdog-website-mysteriously-shut-down/
URLs in this post:
[1] Image: http://img.metblogs.com/la/files/2008/03/police.jpg
[2] RateMyCop.com: http://ratemycop.com/
[3] told Wired’s Threat Level blog: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/godaddy-silence.html
[4] LA Cityzine: http://www.la.cityzine.com/2008/03/03/new-website-rate-my-cop/
[5] Thrillist!: http://www.thrillist.com/
[6] photo by Mahalie: http://flickr.com/photos/mahalie/416928782/
[7] Dear LA Food Bloggers: Please Do Not Shut Down: http://la.metblogs.com/2009/10/02/dear-la-food-bloggers-please-do-not-shut-down/
[8] Police can only handcuff you in two instances…: http://la.metblogs.com/2009/03/23/police-can-only-handcuff-you-in-two-instances/
[9] A Christmas Poem for the ages: http://la.metblogs.com/2008/12/24/a-christmas-poem-for-the-ages/
[10] (disproven) Rumor: Chris Brown in high speed police chase, right now?: http://la.metblogs.com/2009/02/09/rumor-chris-brown-in-high-speed-police-chase-right-now/
[11] Songs about Los Angeles: Fuck Tha Police by NWA: http://la.metblogs.com/2009/04/13/songs-about-los-angeles-fuck-tha-police-by-nwa/
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