I noticed that some law enforcement departments are trying to get you to remove police location reporting from waze. Here is an easy solution that will save the usefulness of this feature and protect police from being targeted.
Make the feature work on roads and highways but disable it in cities. Knowing the location of police on the road improves driver awareness and increases public safety. Knowing where they are taking a coffee break or paroling in cities could help criminals planning crimes or those targeting police.
Disagree, because the police conduct speed traps and other revenue-generation activities within cities as well, and in some areas they do so at a much higher volume than similar activities out on highways. Doing it this way would essentially make this feature useless in, for example, most of Southern California, where the “city” covers hundreds of square miles and encompasses numerous actual named “cities”.
This is just cops complaining about people getting better of them.
People targeting police are going to target police. Criminals are going to find ways to find cops. How many wazers are using waze to report cops sitting at a doughnut shop? i’d figure none. Wazers are reporting cops set up for speed traps or stopped with someone pulled over. This is FUD fueled by the thought of loss of ticket revenue.
So heres my thoughts on this and what waze can do to keep the feature but yet help improve “officer safety.” As a police officer myself, with the growing number of attacks on police these days, the concerns by law enforcement are legitimate, however I think a compromise can be reached per say to make everyone happy. If Waze is forced to make a change, My solution, keep police reporting functionality exactly the same along with alerting for them, however just remove the icon for them on the map. That way people can’t just “scan the map” to find police sitting somewhere and will only receive an alert if they are driving on a road where police have been reported. That way, us wazers still get what we want, and the police get what they want.
I like your idea MGODLEW but I would suggest only showing the icon when you are within 1 mile and not on LiveMap. To me, the icon really doesn’t tell you anything. If there are multiple officers, an attack is unlikely. I find that most of the ones I see are involved in a traffic stop or gone. Any police officer that wants to be safer should keep moving.
On the other hand, if a couple of cars are pulled off the side of the road and a police vehicle is there, i tend to report “police,” though it may be a fender bender. I may have to change it to “minor accident” to give more of an advance warning.