Can Waze Still Track The Police?

We may have reached the point where we have to look back on “the good old days” of Waze. That’s one conclusion to draw from a viral TikTok clip showing a Waze user pulled over by flashing police lights, clearly indicating that the map app isn't as reliable as it once was at avoiding the fuzz.

The clip from TikTokker Kain Jackson (@oritsukain) is a quick visit inside a parked car, where he’s the passenger, navigating the dashboard app to let other users know the police had just nabbed the car for an undisclosed violation.

“Waze sold the bag,” he laments with a forced chuckle, sounding disappointed by the performance of the app that had a reputation for helping motorists avoid speed traps and police cruisers lurking along roadways.

The incident sparked a raging debate in the comments section, with users sharing their own practices for alerting others to police patrols and revealing ways patrol cars try to counter digital watchdogs.

“My brother in law is a cop and told me he sits on waze and maps and says "no longer there" so, now y'all know they are working against those apps,” one user wrote, though others countered that it takes input from multiple users to get a police icon removed from an area: “Users have scores. If he consistently does that, and two minutes later somebody else flags the cops still being there… his “not there” reports don’t matter,” countered another user.

The Ways Waze Works

More than a decade into its widespread adoption, Waze pretty much needs no introduction. For years, the secret sauce for dodging police came from its legions of users/drivers, who alerted others to obstacles, traffic jams, and other disruptions on roadways.

When a user spots a patrol car, they can flag it on the app with a quick tap to generate an icon that alerts everyone else traveling the same route. It was a crowdsourcing way to stay one step ahead of the law and to make it easy for others to look out for icons and notice if they slow down or otherwise behave.

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But the clip shows that determined police have turned the app into a kind of cat-and-mouse game as its use has evolved. The functionality of assigning reliability scores to users would seem to ensure that some trustworthiness is baked in, preventing police from disappearing from the app, so it's unclear how we should judge what's shown in the video.

On the other side of the coin, the tools police use to catch speeders and other moving violations remain the same: radar and lidar. But the biggest tactical change might be a move away from the traditional black-and-white cruiser in favor of “ghost cars” or unmarked vehicles that blend in with traffic and make them harder to visually identify.

And since no segment of society is untouched by AI and automation, speed and red light cameras are a growing part of roadway life. All of which means we can speed along and think we've avoided detection, only to get an unpleasant surprise in the mailbox in the form of a ticket.

Other Police Detection Options

There is some promise in technology available in electric vehicles, particularly in brands like Tesla, which brought new ways for drivers to try to get a leg up on law enforcement. Rather than any radar detection or sensors, it's the so-called Cop Mode that is proving useful. The third-party browser-based app from TeslaNav essentially runs a Waze-style report on the vehicle’s nav screen, flagging police, speed cameras, and any alarming traffic in real time.

Early reports, though, indicate that the technology is a little wobbly and unreliable, with users sharing details of its occasional failure to work or of it cutting out while driving.

That uncertainty means there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that will let drivers travel at top speed without worry. Radar-detection technology still appears to be a useful tool for getting an early warning of police in the area. There’s also the less-flashy but still worthwhile police-avoidance tips, like keeping your car properly maintained and repairing malfunctioning lights, avoiding busy travel times when traffic enforcement is likely to be watching, and being extra cautious during periods when police may be under pressure to meet their ticket quotas.

InsideEVs reached out to Jackson via direct message and commented on the clip. We’ll update this if they respond.

 

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