You rate restaurants with online reviews. Same with contractors, professors, even blogs. Now a new web services allows the public to rate and comment on the work of uniformed law enforcement officers.  Some sites already provide aggregate data for neighborhoods, but let’s face it, sometimes you may want to discuss the work of a particular officer.

That’s where Rate My Cop comes in. Though no personal information is posted on this site, police departments are understandably concerned. Nobody likes the kind of happy slander that anonymous web communities so easily spawn.  Reputations will certainly be maligned, or for that matter falsely inflated, through such posts. However, isn’t that risk part of free speech generally?

Continued