NYPD has a bone to pick with Waze on stop-checks
Users post speed traps and RIDE checks
Did you hear that thudding sound? It was the barn door. The horses are long gone.
You might have an app on your phone called Waze. It’s been around for about seven years, a user-based navigation system you can download for free. Users upload information about road conditions and traffic to help each other out. It’s not unlike a typical GPS system in many ways, but with the addition of user recommendations and feedback. It was eventually bought by Google, and the app now supports Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. In other words, it’s everywhere. And that’s a problem for the New York Police Department.
The NYPD recently sent Google a letter saying that Waze was bad for business. Apparently, Waze users routinely post the locations of speed traps, and more importantly, sobriety checkpoints. From the letter, published by CBS:
“The posting of such information for public consumption is irresponsible since it only serves to aid impaired and intoxicated drivers to evade checkpoints and encourage reckless driving.”
Hard to argue? Not so much as pointless even to bother. I’m not sure what the NYPD is trying to do, because Twitter — which has been around even longer — has had users posting checkpoints constantly. Waze is more direct and more accessible to more users, but the concept is the same: An openly public, readily available app that can be on any phone telling you what is happening up ahead.
When I first discovered my feed full of Twitter warnings of RIDE checkpoints years ago, I reacted like the NYPD did: I called for the users’ heads. I bleated about the danger of warning the drunks. I wondered how this could possibly be legal. But of course it is legal, the same way someone can use their computer to look at boobs all day and I can look at otters. Terrorist threats and hate crimes aside, we are allowed to toss out there whatever we want, if we’re on the forum. Waze helps people circumvent congestion; sobriety checkpoints cause congestion.
Back in December, I asked Sgt. Brett Moore with Toronto Police Service about the impact and fallout with apps like Waze. He acknowledged it was something for police to contend with, but didn’t pretend anyone could stuff the toothpaste back in the tube.
When I was a teen, we’d hide radar detectors in a Kleenex box on the dash. Illegal in Ontario, you’d hear the first blip and yank it out and hide it. We weren’t very cunning; I remember more than one driver I was with having the contraption confiscated. In British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan, where radar detectors are legal, I’d be interested to know how fast the technology changes that is used by both hunter and prey.
And it’s always the technology that is at the core of these discussions. In 2016, police in British Columbia started using a camera that can snap pictures of you using your hand-held device — from more than a kilometre away. You can look around as surreptitiously as you like, but unless you’re the Six Million Dollar Man, you aren’t going to be able to see that far.
Police have pretended to be squeegee artists at stopped intersections. There was a hue and cry over that one, but just like drivers using radar detectors and posting information on Twitter and Waze, both sides will continue to ramp up and refine their approaches.
The chance of the NYPD’s request to Google making it to court — or making it at all — is slim. If anything, it seemed like a needless admission that they’re losing the battle. The most wry moment in the whole discussion probably came from a contributor on the Gizmodo forum about the topic:
“Ummm New York state law REQUIRES that DWI checkpoints are publicly posted ahead of time. Both time and place. So uhhh are they going to arrest themselves?”
Look for the NYPD walkback on this one in three, two, one ...
It would be very nice if everyone who made use of technology only did so with noble intentions. But what you consider dangerous, another might simply deem information. Police departments, like everything else on this planet, will adapt or lose.