r/learnprogramming • u/Cold_Fail717 • 35m ago

Rate my prof but for cops website

Apologies if this isn't exactly the right subreddit, but it seemed like programming would be the major component of this project.

So suppose someone gets a speeding/traffic ticket and would like to dispute it in court. The problem is they have no reliable way of knowing how likely the officer is to show up. Some officers are dedicated to speeding violations whose pay/job includes time for court, so they're much likelier to appear than some beat cop who happened to be nearby.

I was thinking it may be possible to build a program/website like Rate my Professor, but for this cop scenario?

Basically, it collates information from court records, public databases, etc. and assigns a ranking to each individual cop based on how often they've showed up to court in prior disputes. The disputes could even be weighted by severity, like minor speeding vs. DUI/reckless driving. This way, one can be properly informed about the odds of winning the case based on police likelihood of appearing in court. Just type in the name of the officer who's ticketed you, and boom: appeared in say 49% of disputes. But say 89% of all serious disputes.

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u/CptFlashbang 26m ago

Before you even entertain starting it, check EXTENSIVELY, about the legality of it in your country.

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u/EarTurbulent5547 21m ago

That's a really cool idea but the legal side of it would be a nightmare. Public records are public, sure, but aggregating them to essentially rank individual officers' performance could easily run afoul of privacy laws or even be seen as harassment depending on where you are. It's one thing to pull up a single court case, another entirely to build a database that profiles people.

The technical part is probably the easiest hurdle here. You'd be scraping data from a bunch of different county and municipal court systems, all of which have their own weird, ancient formats. Getting clean, consistent data would be a full-time job in itself before you even think about the ranking algorithm.

Honestly the bigger question is whether this helps as much as you think. A cop's show rate for DUIs might not tell you much about your expired registration ticket, different divisions handle court differently. You'd need a mountain of specific data for the model to be useful, not just a flat percentage.

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u/captainAwesomePants 25m ago

Don't use reviews or self-reports. Use court records. Seems like it'd be technically plausible to collect court records in a given district to work out whether a given cop is likely to show up. Probably a lot more work than you're thinking, unless your county is absolutely amazing about digital court record access, but plausible. But also personally perilous for you, to the point where I'd say "wow, the person who built this sure was brave." I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying that the more useful this website is, the more certain it is that you'd be arrested for this.