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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.'"
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.'"
What about the non-criminals who want to know where the police are so they can get some help from them? Or what about the non-criminals who want to know when police officers are blocking a side of the road, or dealing with a traffic situation? If they really don't want to be bothered, they should just drive unmarked cars, make their phone numbers unlisted, and institute some kind of paywall for their official web sites.
Instead of removing information from Waze, they should just be adding information to it with their own api. They could transmit the gps location of their marked cars in real-time (like bus systems now do with the nextbus api). When responding to a call, they should just send the person who called a real-time update of their estimated arrival. And when there is a bank robbery, they should just flood the Waze api with virtual police officers everywhere.
Not only that, but if the police could try to crowdsource the effort of looking for bank robbers, child abductors, or the obvious-looking drunk drivers, through Waze instead of overburdening the outdated the 911 system, that would help them prioritize and weed out most of the false positives in real-time.
Colour me confused but aren't police meant to be visible on patrol, reassuring the public and obstructing the criminals by their presence. Being a police officer is not meant to be about being a revenue machines on the clock but a peace officer assisting the public in upholding the law and providing a first response emergency service. So shouldn't police be more like, hmm, great app, let's try to be everywhere on it and not just sitting down on our doughnut munching lard arses, as mobile revenue machines targeting the poor and middle class.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Agreed and trapster and other apps do the same crowdsourced speed trap locating trick.
Trapster had better audio alerts but they don't work on my new phone so I use waze now.
It also flagged "likely" speed traps even when the police were not yet reported in the location.
Using the app to locate a speedtrap is about as productive as driving along the road and observing parked police cars then circling back around and attacking them now that you know where they are.
The police have a problem because they have been killing united states citizens at a rate of roughly 1200* citizens per year (via 528 validated trustworthy news source reported face page reports). More of those citizens killed by united states police were children than all the citizens killed by the police forces of england, france, and germany combined. It is literally (not figuratively) about 120* citizens vs under 20 citizens in england, france, and germany total per year.
Not to mention countless beatings, illegitimate property seizures, and a solid reputation of "good cops" standing aside doing nothing while the "bad" cops commit crimes.
*People who are police officers killed about 1450 citizens but 528.com found that about 200 of the killings were not related to their police status or police duties.
** I support the police and donate to the police fund but our police are out of control and have terrible community relations. We need to get them out of dealing with drug gangs and drug money and swat teams and military equipment. Move that activity to the FBI and return the police to ordinary police enforcement actions. Having a tank and heavy automatic weapons misleads them into killing 7 year old girls when they were at the wrong address.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'd be happy to use an app that didn't track me so much, but to give voluntary info on police speed trap warnings, and traffic incidents, but I don't want them keeping my travel data and tracking me in real time.
This thing looks like a privacy nightmare from the TOS.
I"ve used an older app called "Trapster" which was a bit more anonymous and allowed folks to report speed traps and traffic cameras, etc. I think it fell a bit into dis-use which makes these kind of apps useful or not, but man, I don't like all the tracking and all that Waze does and the information it collects and seems to keep. Otherwise I'd jump on board big time.
Would be nice to know where speed traps and DWI roadblocks are set up when driving.
I prefer to avoid the police while out no matter what the cause.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........