New Site Lists Names of Salt Lake City Police Officers

None by Jeff Robinson

Offers Forum for Commenting on Law Enforcement

(KCPW News) A new web site allows citizens to leave comments about specific police officers in law enforcement agencies across the country, including here in Salt Lake City. Rebecca Costell co-founded Ratemycop.com, which went online ten days ago and is still in beta testing. She says the goal is to allow people to share their experiences with law enforcement, both good and bad.

"We wanted to create a place where not only would we be able to monitor police performance, but we could provide feedback about officers, who are being paid by tax dollars, and have it like a feedback forum where you could share your input about the officer you just got a ticket from," said Costell.

The web site has already been condemned by law enforcement officials in San Francisco. Costell says their reaction is based on misguided fears that the website intends to publish officers' addresses, phone numbers and personnel records, which she says it will not publish. She says the site plans to add a way for officers to respond to comments made about them.

Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank says the web site doesn't raise any privacy concerns for him; he even wants the department to start its own feedback forum on the agency's web site. But he is concerned that people who don't take the site seriously will leave comments that don't have any value -- for example, one comment left about a female officer in Salt Lake City says "dude, this is the hottest cop ever!"

"As we started looking at doing something for our own, we were hopeful to give a little more direction -- what about this interaction was negative, why did you give those as opposed to, just, okay, here's a couple stars or some very brief comment that doesn't have anything positive or negative to really give the officer feedback that we would want to change behavior," said Chief Burbank.

Burbank says other leaders in the department also like the idea of having their own forum for people to submit comments about law enforcement officers.

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