I got home from work today to find three…no, wait…five…no…SIX police cars quietly parked outside one of the small multi-unit buildings across the street. In the front yard, a few cops were minding four guys in handcuffs. The rest of the police were just kind of milling about, half-assedly glancing in the recycle bins out front. and leaning on their cars.

Of course I was curious as to what the hell was going on. Was I about to wander over and ask? No. I doubted I’d get an answer, and besides, those cops looked busy! Busy…hanging out. Where was the sense of urgency? Where was the combing of the premises? I don’t expect every cop raid to look like TV, but even grow-op busts in Vancouver are less laid back than this! Did I miss all the action before I got home, and, if so, why were there still so many police and cars around? And what the hell was the LAPD helicopter circling around for? I’m used to hearing the helicopter doing a nightly sweep of the area, but that’s usually after dark.

Hopefully, the story will surface on a police website, or a local paper, or something, so I can find out what terrible crime merited six cop cars in a residential neighborhood. Any suggestions?

Another photo after the jump

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RateMyCop.com, a Culver City based website allowing the public to review individual police officer performance, was pulled offline by webhost GoDaddy sometime on Tuesday.

Gino Testo, who started the site with his wife, told Wired’s Threat Level blog that initially GoDaddy reps told him that the site was shut down for “suspicious activity,” but later told him the site had exceeded its enormous 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, causing Testo to call bullshit: “”How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,00 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?”

…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.

Undercover officers are not included in reports. Threat Level adds that GoDaddy “is known to be quick to censor its customers,” and when refused to comment for their story citing its privacy policy.

More information on RateMyCop at LA Cityzine and Thrillist!… photo by Mahalie used under Creative Commons.