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Police Organization Wants Cop-Spotting Dropped From Waze App
An anonymous reader writes "The Register reports on a request from the US National Sheriffs' Association, which "wants Google to block its crowd-sourced traffic app Waze from being able to report the position of police officers, saying the information is putting officer's lives at risk." From the article: "'The police community needs to coordinate an effort to have the owner, Google, act like the responsible corporate citizen they have always been and remove this feature from the application even before any litigation or statutory action,' AP reports Sheriff Mike Brown, the chairman of the NSA's technology committee, told the association's winter conference in Washington....Brown called the app a 'police stalker,' and said being able to identify where officers were located could put them at personal risk. Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, said his members had concerns as well. 'I can think of 100 ways that it could present an officer-safety issue,' Pasco said. 'There's no control over who uses it. So, if you're a criminal and you want to rob a bank, hypothetically, you use your Waze.'"
Actually it isn't useless. Having emergency responders spread out, instead of gathered at the station, can significantly reduce response times in the event of an emergency.
This was one of the subjects of a friend's Ph.D. dissertation. He used it to show that while random spread can reduce emergency response times, creating patrol routes that target hot spots based on time of day can reduce response times nearly in half (compared with random spread).
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
You're absolutely right. And this is coming from a man whose late wife was a police officer. I love the police (for the most part), but they have no right of privacy any more than we do when they're out in public. We should not only know where they are, we should be able to video them doing their jobs. They work for us.
My wife and I used to argue about revenue from tickets. She always said they write tickets for public safety. I always said let them put their money where their mouth is and give all the money to the state. No dice - they want the money.
Waze isn't a cop searching app. It's a driving directions app that shows where cops are so people can avoid speed traps while driving. It also shows traffic accidents, where cars are pulled over on the side of the road, where lanes are closed, where construction is taking place, etc. Basically anything that would be useful for a driver to know. In fact, most of the time it's making the road safer for cops because if they've pulled someone over on the side of the road and a person using Waze reports that there's a cop, then other drivers on the road using the app will know to look out for the cop when they drive near that area and are less likely to accidentally hit them.
Note that I'm not making any argument that the ability to point out cops should be removed. Just that maybe you should do some modicum of research (i.e. type "waze" into google and skim the first result) before you start talking about shit and end up sounding like a moron, which decreases the strength of your argument considerably.