Special permissions for "verified" law enforcement?

[Car144]

This is a familiar topic, and I have tried running some searches on this particular permutation but without success. Hopefully this is a good subforum for it.

In short, I got into a conversation on Facebook today and a local LEO entered the chat. He made the old claim that LEOs just report “not there” when someone reports them on Waze and, poof, magically they’re gone. When I explained that’s not how it works (my understanding is each report of “not there” reduces a reports duration on the map for other users, while “still there” increases it), he claimed that if a LEO registers and is verified as law enforcement, they are able to remove the report.

To my mind, this is puffery of a self-important cop who thinks he has special powers (it would also be in total conflict with the feature itself) +, but it was enough it made me curious to start looking and asking around.

Any veracity to what he’s claiming?

[jm6087]

To the best of my knowledge, there are no special permissions for “verified” LEOs

It they press “Not there” then it will disappear for them but it may or may not meet the threshold to be removed for all. This is the same for everyone.

[turbomkt]

@Car144

This is a familiar topic, and I have tried running some searches on this particular permutation but without success. Hopefully this is a good subforum for it.

In short, I got into a conversation on Facebook today and a local LEO entered the chat. He made the old claim that LEOs just report “not there” when someone reports them on Waze and, poof, magically they’re gone. When I explained that’s not how it works (my understanding is each report of “not there” reduces a reports duration on the map for other users, while “still there” increases it), he claimed that if a LEO registers and is verified as law enforcement, they are able to remove the report.

To my mind, this is puffery of a self-important cop who thinks he has special powers (it would also be in total conflict with the feature itself) +, but it was enough it made me curious to start looking and asking around.

Any veracity to what he’s claiming?

John is 100% correct.

With that said…Some LEOs report themselves in Waze when their goal is safety and not revenue.

[nzahn1]

See also my reply to the recent inquiry on Reddit:

Any user’s reports are subject to the user’s own reputation score, which is based on that user’s report history. New users have no score, and so their reports are not visible by anyone. Users who spam reports have a poor score, due to the constant negative feedback (“Not there”) from other users, and so reports from spammy users may also not be published.

There is no such thing as a “verified account” for LEOs.

Users can raise their app reputation by becoming high ranking editors in the mapping community, which requires review of their activities by other community members and/or staff.

Govt agencies can become Waze for Cities partners, which allows the posting of some alerts (construction, blocked lane, road closed), but police is not available via these W4C tools, and any W4C partner posting inaccurate or misleading info can be removed from the program.