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.'"

Comments

Simple solution

[msobkow]

Stop setting up cash-cow speed traps. :P

Re:Simple solution

[reboot246]

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.

Criminal?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Newsflash: You're in public too

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Newsflash: You're in public too

[Rockoon]

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.

Re:Newsflash: You're in public too

[Bing Tsher E]

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.

FUD

[Lunix Nutcase]

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?

Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men?

[TiggertheMad]

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.

Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men?

[Moof123]

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).

Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men?

[rtb61]

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.

Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men?

[JamieMcGuigan]

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.

Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men?

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:No fuck off

[bondsbw]

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).