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Police Organization Wants Cop-Spotting Dropped From Waze App

Posted by samzenpus on from the don't-report-me dept.

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.'"

20 of 468 comments (clear)

  1. Simple solution by msobkow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Stop setting up cash-cow speed traps. :P

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    1. Re:Simple solution by Gription · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Enforcement has always been about money instead of safety. NHTSA studies have consistently shown that driving slower then the flow of traffic has a WAY higher risk of causing of accidents then driving the same speed faster then the flow. The fact is people get excited by speed so they put up with the focus on speed and cops get a rush out of enforcing it. It is much more interesting then enforcing failure to yield / right of way and other truly dangerous acts.

      Can the police supply a single instance where Waze actually caused a single injury of a police officer? If is amazing how many police officers signed up for an exciting career in law enforcement (exciting because it has risk) and recently they have been starting to whine about the risk from non credible sources of risk.

    2. Re:Simple solution by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 4, Insightful

      give all the money to the state

      Donate it all to charity (that isn't the fraternal order of police, or some self-serving operation), mail it all to the north pole, but not the state. In some places the states or local governments have "arrangements' with the police to share this money. Further amongst themselves the police divide up roads for state, county and local coverage. You can tell because you can blow by a local cop on the interstate and he won't twitch, even if you're in his city limits. If it was about public safety he'd pull you over just to stop you, even if he was powerless to ticket you. The cat and mouse game around stop signs and traffic lights in some areas has reached epic proportions. There should not be a debate about whether you fully stopped, or almost stopped... only that you followed the intent of the intersection control.

      Take away the money motive and I think police would start enforcing traffic laws based on actual danger, rather than what they think they can stick you with.

  2. Criminal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is about ticket revenue. Nothing more, and nothing less.

  3. Newsflash: You're in public too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Finding out where the police are should be as easy as it is for them to find you.

    1. Re:Newsflash: You're in public too by Rockoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is just metadata about the police. It isnt telling the waze user anything specific about what the police are saying...

      The police should just man up and trust us with this unimportant information.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    2. Re:Newsflash: You're in public too by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It should be easier for a citizen to find the police. They are public servants, and they are there to help us. Right? An app that shows where the nearest police officer is located should even be tax funded, possibly.

  4. Our revenue stream your personal freedoms by AuralityKev · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "We're afraid someone will use this knowledge to attack police officers because they know where we'll be!" Right, because you can't magically call some 3 digit number to summon them to you if you're planning a horrific deed? Some crazed lunatic needs Waze to carry out his dastardly plan? Or is it rather that you don't really want people to know exactly which billboard you're hiding behind at the side of the road to nail people for going 3 mph over the limit?

  5. Wait a minute... by brainboyz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...you mean the police don't like being stalked, electronically followed, and reported on without a warrant?

  6. FUD by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Waze has been around for over 6 years. If this were a legitimate concern why can he not point to a single incident of someone doing exactly this rather than merely spreading FUD?

  7. Re:No fuck off by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They don't actually work "real crimes" anymore. They have automated systems which allow you to file a police report that they can then ignore. However if you're sleeping in a park, it takes three cop cars and a supervisor to harass you.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  8. Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? by TiggertheMad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps the police should stop behaving in was that make non-criminals scared of them. The number of dangerous criminals in society is really very small. If this app is downloaded more than a few hundred times that would indicate that more people than just hardened criminals want to keep tabs on cops. Just the download counter for the app could be read as a social barometer of public trust.

    Also, the watchmen don't like being watched? Tough shit. You want more power than the average person, you had better get used to extra scrutiny too.

    --

    HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
    1. Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? by CauseBy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Also, the watchmen don't like being watched? Tough shit."

      Exactly. Google should word it more politically but I hope "No, fuck you" is an accurate paraphrase of their response.

    2. Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? by Moof123 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Speeding laws and their enforcement are corrosive to our sense of justice. Think of it as a gateway law to break.

      Drive the speed limit and you get angry people tailgating you and angrily making unsafe passes even when you are in the slow lane. Clearly in most places the speed limits are too low. So most folks in decent highway conditions drive 10-15 mph over the limit, which makes them all law breakers.

      Cops don't clearly state at what point they will pull someone over, or what cup size allows you to talk your way out of a ticket, which really erodes our sense of equal justice for all (and violates our constitutionally guaranteed right to equal protection under the law). In fact we all violate the law several times a day just to live like a normal citizens, and much of the time we are pretty unaware something was even against the law (a sure sign our legal system has gotten out of hand). Cops get to choose when to apply esoteric laws and when to ignore pretty basic ones (depends highly on skin color or the presence of a badge).

    3. Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? by w_dragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      To me it would make sense to separate traffic enforcement from policing. Create a traffic patrol that has only very limited police powers to enforce the traffic laws, and let them call in the police if there's something they can't deal with. They have less power so can be paid less, and it may lower the risk of violence at a traffic stop if the dealer in the car knows the worst the person pulling him over can do is write a ticket for speeding. Then the police are free to deal with crimes that people actually care about and can work on improving their image.

    4. Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? by s.petry · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's BS to say it's putting cops' lives at risk, for the most part.

      Well, "Save the children" and "all men are rapists" have already been overused, they had to come up with some type of appeal to emotion slogan to be taken seriously right?

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    5. Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? by JamieMcGuigan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's BS to say it's putting cops' lives at risk, for the most part.

      Presumably anybody using this app to search for cops is going to be using it to deliberately avoid coming in contact with any cops. This outcome is actually the lowest risk outcome for any type of police encounter.

      The way this has been phrased, you would almost imagine that there are anti-police death squads roaming the city, looking for isolated police units far away from backup and slowly picking them off with a sniper rifle.

    6. Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? by slashdot_commentator · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not a cop locating app, it's an app to suggest alternate routes of travel around congested areas. It just has a feature to show where police are, but that's not the purpose of it.

      It's BS to say it's putting cops' lives at risk, for the most part. That being said, a lot of cops are feeling really under attack these days because of the public outrage over the last few months and the cops who were ambushed in NYC--like, their families are really worried about them, and I Can respect that.

      Then you're as stupid as the cops. Its the cops' job to put themselves into "dangerous" situations in order to protect the public. Cops are scared of "stalkers"? As if stalkers wouldn't exist without a phone app??? Should cops be scared of breathing city air? Should we be providing them breathing masks along with their bulletproof vests and 17 round firearms?

      Those two cops that were murdered in NYC were not killed because of an app. They were killed because a deranged shitbag got the jump on them. If cops feel justified killing misdemeanor lifestyle criminals with dangerous, prohibited chokeholds, then they should not feel like the people who pay their salaries support them.

      Use your brain. The cops don't want waze because it makes it harder for them to meet their arrest quotas. That is the only effect a speedtrap app can have

      That being said, people would be dumb not to check it before robbing a bank, I suppose. Of course, most people who rob banks are pretty dumb.

      Only a moron would depend on a voluntary participation app to keep him from getting arrested in a bank robbery. Don't go into crime, you'd get arrested with the other dumbasses.

      --
      There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
  9. Oversight by gatfirls · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Police want to be able to (without warrant or cause) track you, record you, search you, go through your cell phone, and whatever else the fancy at the moment but once there is the slightest attempt at any monitoring or oversight of the police they go apeshit about their rights and their safety.

    It's so backwards it's almost a parody of the intent of the constitution and government accountability.

  10. This is a BS concern. by nsxdavid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I use Waze virtually every day. It can only be used to spot for cops who are running speedtraps. It doesn't "stalk" them in anyway. It is not very accurate because it relies on someone to note their location, and cops move a lot (say, when they go after a speeder and setup somewhere else or move on with other duties). At best it can bed give you info like "There's been some activity by police looking for speeders around here recently."

    If Google caves to this nonsense, I'm going to be very disappointed. And, for the record, never have any reason to use Waze again.

    --
    David Whatley