“People have the right to talk about [where the police are] and Google and Waze have the right to create a platform for that,” he said. “People have been sharing this information for decades. Before social media people were using CB radios. It’s not as if this is a novel thing.”
Surge in police hostility
John Thompson, the deputy executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association, argues that the increased targeting of police is what makes the app worrying.
“In the ’70s and ’60s, when we used CB radios, times were different,” he told NPR radio on Wednesday. “People weren’t assassinating police officers.”
That fear is not exaggerated. Since the deaths of Lui and Ramos in December, police have gone to great lengths to express concern for their own safety, even imposing an unofficial weeks-long strike in New York City, where the NYPD argued it was unsafe to work (partly due to an apparent lack of support from Mayor Bill de Blasio in the latest development in an ongoing conflict between the two parties).
“It is an uncomfortable feeling knowing that your location is so readily available via a crowd-sourced app,” Anthony Lewis (not his real name), a patrol officer who works in the Westchester area of New York State, told FRANCE 24 on Thursday. Having used the app himself before joining the police, Lewis is sympathetic to drivers who want to avoid checkpoints, but he finds the role it played in the murders of Lui and Ramos “unnerving”.
“I don’t see much difference between Waze reporting where checkpoints are and people reporting [the same information] on Twitter,” he said. “But it makes it that much easier to target a police officer if someone with ill intentions wished to do so.”
Lewis cites a growing public hostility towards law enforcement that exploded following the police deaths of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and 43-year-old Eric Garner in New York. The mass protests that followed their deaths, and the failure of the authorities to bring the officers who caused them to justice, saw police cars set on fire and some demonstrators shouting “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!”
‘Police don’t like being watched’
Lewis, who is African American, says he feels “like much more of a target now”.
