Cops are known for being on and off. I will one day fix this issue.
I made this in a week. How long could it take me to make an app? Probably not long. Here is the idea. If you want to steal it, go ahead.
Cop Tracker. Name is a work in progress but it functions similarly to the way RateMyProfessors works. You simply get the name, rate them on an assortment of different things, then you give an overall, public rating. Here is the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The good:
Being able to see ratings of cops in your area would work well as they are required to give a name and badge number when asked. The data collection would work great. You could see the average rating of cops in an area. If there is an area with a 2 star rating, people would not move in, and it could possibly lead to change as the local government would be incentivized to change things up to get more people to move in. After a long time and gaining a lot of credibility, pairing with Apple or Google would work well as you can click on a county, town, or city and see the average ratings of police. Police with a low rating would be noticed by their sheriff and would either be dealt with or be constantly bugged by the public.
The bad:
Spam would be annoying and you would have to let people review hoping any encounter actually happened. You wouldn’t want to force verification as nobody would leave reviews. People would review-bomb. There would require constant manual moderation.
People have bias and that bias would make every town have a 2 star rating on average, as the point of getting pulled over is getting a punishment. This (hopefully) wouldn’t matter as long as some amount of people are level-heads and rate the police on fairness. The hope is that it would be like McDonalds reviews. You expect it to be decent at best, but the yelp reviews being 3 stars can be a great sign.
The ugly:
The police/ government would not be a fan of this. There was once a website called CopScore that had the same idea. For reasons unknown to me, its gone. RateMyCop had a wiki page for it. After some legal battles, its gone. This isn’t a new idea, its just taken down pretty quickly. For how useful RateMyProfessor is for students, if a new app created enough public interest, it would stay.
This idea would have to either create a large amount of interest quickly and die in a large fire, or survive and create change. I would not release it without trying to get some sort of press on it. Quietly dying would change nothing.
Why would I make this app? I am a normal white dude. I have seizures every now and then, and one time I had a seizure driving with my girlfriend and totaled my car. Unharmed and very lucky, we got out of the car and called 911. An officer was the first on the scene. Instead of asking if we are okay, if I was injured, or trying to evaluate me for a concussion, he asks if I was drunk. Mind you, after having a seizure, everybody acts different but I was completely there. He was only asking because who would randomly crash a car? After saying no, he continues to press me, not worried about any condition, then goes into the cop car to file a report or something. He takes my girlfriend aside and does the same to her, asking if I was drinking. I offered to take a test just to shut him up, then he finally stopped pressing, going back to the car. When the firefighters showed, they actually helped which was nice. Super cool, asking me one time what happened and if I was drunk, and actually believed me when I said no.
Using trash equipment, they checked on me and repeatedly asked me if I was okay, like doctors with a pure heart. All of them were the nicest ever. The EMS showed up like it was just another call and took me into the truck saying “you cant get in trouble if you say you were drunk to us so just spill the truth” and I told them I wasn’t drunk, and one seemed just like “yeah okay” and the rest seemed to believe me.
Using trash equipment, they checked on me and repeatedly asked me if I was okay, like doctors with a pure heart. All of them were the nicest ever. The EMS showed up like it was just another call and took me into the truck saying “you cant get in trouble if you say you were drunk to us so just spill the truth” and I told them I wasn’t drunk, and one seemed just like “yeah okay” and the rest seemed to believe me.
I understood why I wasn’t believed by people, yet amazed by how little that cop cared about my well being. After this all happened, I received a letter in the mail from the government that I could not drive for 6 months. By the time I had received the letter, it had been 6 months. The government and cops need to have somebody watching over them. This app would be perfect. That dude would have gotten a 2 star rating from me, and other cops I have had would get a nice 5 star rating.
Through the law of averages, we would see bad apples in plain sight.
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