Civil liberties lawyers, free speech advocates and even some police departments have rushed to the defence of the popular road navigation app Waze after Charlie Beck, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, accused the service of endangering officers and helping criminals by publicizing the position of their patrol cars.



Beck went public with his criticisms on Tuesday, publishing a letter he wrote to Waze’s parent company, Google, in the wake of two officer shootings in New York last month and saying at a news conference: “It is not always in the public’s best interest to know where police are operating.”

Response to Beck has ranged from indignation to blank disbelief, since the LAPD’s own patrol cars are known to use social media to advertise their presence in high-crime areas and the cars themselves are designed to be as visible as possible.

“You have the stripes and the red lights and the word ‘police’ in big letters. These cars are very conspicuous. It stands to reason you can talk about seeing one, whether by text, or by phone or through an app like Waze,” said David Maass, a researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties advocacy group. “People have a First Amendment right to say what they can see with their own two eyes … and Google and Waze have the same right to post this information.”

The issue has struck a nerve – because digital technology has transformed the way police departments operate, often making their operations more transparent than law enforcement officials would like, and because surveillance in the digital age can cut both ways. Both the LAPD and the LA Sheriff’s Department have been sued over their refusal to provide information about their use of automatic license plate readers, a technology that has been used to track millions of ordinary citizens in Los Angeles as they go about their daily routines.

In his letter to Google chief executive Larry Page, Beck claimed that the man accused of gunning down two New York cops in their patrol car last month had tracked them using Waze. “Your … app,” he wrote, “ as currently configured poses a danger to the lives of police officers in the United States.”

That does not square with what investigators in the case have told the media, however. While it is true that police found a screenshot from Waze on Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s Instagram account, they do not believe he tracked the officers with the app – not least because he tossed his cell phone away two miles from where he shot and killed them.

Chief Beck’s concerns were emphatically not echoed by his counterparts in San Francisco, San Jose and other big California cities contacted by local reporters. “We want to be seen,” a spokeswoman for the San Jose police told the San Jose Mercury-News. Officers being highly visible on patrol, she said, helps reduce crime.

Waze itself pushed back hard against Beck, saying it had collaborated with police departments, including the NYPD, and saw itself as a contributor to public safety. “Police partners support Waze and its features,” spokeswoman Julie Mossler said, “including reports of police presence, because most users tend to drive more carefully when they believe law enforcement is nearby.”

David Maass of EFF, which is a party to the lawsuit against the LAPD and LASD, said big-city police departments have a history of resistance to anything shedding light on their operations. “They will seize cameras from reporters recording protests. They will deny public records requests. They will oppose apps that might show where DUI checkpoints are,” he said. “They don’t like the public knowing what they are doing.”

A number of police watchdogs said they suspected Beck’s criticisms were motivated, in part, by the obstacles Waze can pose to the setting up of effective speed traps, which in the pre-digital age were a reliable source of city income through traffic tickets.

The Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has chosen not to comment on the Waze controversy, but its lead lawyer monitoring the police, Peter Bibring, sent a biting Tweet on Tuesday night contrasting the LAPD’s estimated 250m automatic license plate readings of “law-abiding LA drivers” with its opposition to Waze reporting speed traps.

Maass said there were many more instances of police abuse of digital technology than there were instances of that technology being used against them. In Calexico, on California’s Mexican border, the FBI was recently called in to investigate officers who turned their surveillance equipment on each other and on members of the city council they saw as political adversaries.

“Police departments, especially in Los Angeles, like to argue that what the public does in public is fair game. They can record all of your whereabouts,” Maass said. “But when it comes to the public doing the same thing and reporting what they see with their own eyes, then they start crying foul.”

The LAPD did not respond to detailed requests for comment on this story.