One of the nifty features of Waze is its ability to help find you the best route that has the least traffic. It also has the ability to allow users to warn other users of upcoming speed cameras, road blocks or police sightings so that users will slow down if they want to avoid getting pulled over, but unfortunately this is a feature that law enforcement officials aren’t too pleased with.
Speaking to the Associated Press (via Engadget), these police officers believe that Waze’s police finding feature would make it too easy for would-be cop killers to find their targets. It would essentially be putting them on the map for everyone to find. To that extent they are hoping that Google (who owns Waze) will take this under serious consideration and disable the feature.
However the issue here is that the feature relies on crowdsourced data, so unless Waze were to disable the sharing of information entirely, we reckon it would be pretty hard to discourage users to not share where they see police that might be parked by the side of the road, or could have setup road blocks to catch drunk drivers or speedsters.
Disabling the feature would also make Waze lose one of its unique features, but at the same time given the recent spate of police-targeted killings, it is understandable that law enforcement officials are starting to become a bit more sensitive to these kinds of things.