Cop-Watch Site Taken Offline

RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he'd been shut down for "suspicious activity."

When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. "How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,00 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?"

Police departments became uneasy about RateMyCop's plans to watch the
watchers in January, when the Culver City, California, startup began issuing public information requests for lists of uniformed officers.

Then 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.

"Having a website like that puts a lot of law enforcement, in my eyes,
in danger because it exposes us out there," Officer Hector Basurto,
vice president of the Latino Police Officers Association, told ABC television affiliate KGO.

Since undercover officers aren't in the database, and the site has no
personal information like home addresses, that fear seems unfounded.
Chief Jerry Dyer, president of the California Police Chiefs
Association, voices what sounds like a more honest concern: that
officers will face  "unfair maligning" by the citizens they serve.