The Union Statesman

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A site named RateMyCop.com has sprung up of late.  The site does just what it says: you can search most any police department in the country by officer and give a review of that officer.  So let’s say you are on vacation, already forced to endure driving through Nevada, and you get lulled into letting your guards down by signs saying Battle Mountain is the friendliest place in the country.  Then you get pulled over by a jerk highway patrol quota cop for no real reason.  Previous to ratemycop.com, you had no way of complaining without retaliation.  Well, cops, like everyone else, google their own names every once in a while.  And now, when JHPQC googles himself, he’ll see a list of his sins, shouted from the rooftops.

Here’s a real example of the power of ranting online: I was rear-ended a few years ago, and she who rear-ended me had USAA insurance.  (I had GEICO).  Well, USAA did its job, if you can call it that–they constantly lied to me, sent me formal letters with made-up laws in them, threatened me with imaginary frivolous lawsuits until I shut up.  But I had medical bills so I didn’t shut up.  When it hit a year and over $10,000 in medical bills, I got so frustrated at their dishonest representative, Beverly E Dalio, that I started documenting, with as much precision as I could transcribe, our conversations onto my website.  Well, USAA googles themselves.  Beverly Dalio googles herself.  And things started getting done.  I could watch it all from the stats page on my site.  And after a year and something of scams and lies, the USAA rep told me “look, we really don’t question anything under $3000, and we don’t pay anything above $3000 unless you sue us.”  Oh, thank you.  So I called a yellow pages lawyer, talked to him for 20 minutes, and he reappeared a month later with a check for $15,000; and justice was served.

So if you’re the victim of a cop who abuses his power, even if it’s systemic and abusing his power is his job, give ratemycop.com a try.  If enough people do it (and they’re up to 362,000 visits a month as of this writing), google will index them highly, and you’ll start to see Beverly Dalio-style justice.

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