Waze Lets You Report Police Locations. An Entire Sheriffs' Association Asked Google to Turn It Off.
Waze lets drivers crowdsource the location of speed traps and parked patrol cars, which is either a helpful public service or an officer-safety threat depending entirely on which side of the windshield you're on. In January 2015, the National Sheriffs' Association publicly asked Google to turn the feature off. Google's answer, in essence, was no — and a decade later, the feature that police groups called dangerous is still just sitting there in the app, reminding you to slow down.
A Feature Built for Drivers, Read as a Threat by Police
Waze's police-reporting function is popular for the most mundane reason possible: people don't want speeding tickets. But after the December 20, 2014 killing of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu — whose shooter had reportedly been monitoring social media and apps referencing police beforehand — law enforcement groups reframed the feature as something closer to a targeting tool than a convenience. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck sent Google a letter dated December 30, 2014, arguing the app could put officers and the public at risk.
The National Sheriffs' Association Made It a Campaign
The Los Angeles police chief's letter turned into an organized push: the National Sheriffs' Association launched a public campaign in January 2015 specifically asking Google to disable police-location reporting, and the NYPD separately pressed for its removal over concerns about drivers evading DUI checkpoints rather than just speed traps. It was, briefly, one of the more visible law-enforcement-versus-Silicon-Valley standoffs of the decade — an entire national police organization on record asking a tech company to make its own product less useful.
Google Said No, and Explained Why
Waze spokeswoman Julie Mossler responded to the pressure campaign with a version of an argument traffic engineers have made for years: that visible enforcement, even crowdsourced, tends to make people drive more carefully, not less. "Most users tend to drive more carefully when they believe law enforcement is nearby," she told the Associated Press. Google didn't remove the feature, didn't quietly nerf it, and didn't issue a face-saving compromise — it just kept shipping the app the way it already worked, leaving the National Sheriffs' Association's campaign as a footnote rather than a policy change.
The Rare Nice Thing Nobody Actually Took Away
Most stories on this site end with the free or convenient thing getting restricted, sunset, or quietly monetized into something worse. This one is the exception that proves how unusual that pattern is: an organized, national-level campaign by an actual law enforcement association asked for a specific feature to be disabled, and it's still there, in the current version of the app, doing exactly what it did in 2015.
Filed from public reporting:
