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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.'"

9 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.
  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. 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?

  5. 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 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).

    2. 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.