Should traffic and navigation apps allow users to report to other users the locations of DUI stops and police checkpoints?

No. IMO, that is aiding and abetting unlawful activity.

Preventing it is the government restricting my freedom of speech and communications. Telling me that I cannot communicate traffic conditions to you – that’s prior restraint and unconstitutional.

The cops don’t like Waze. Tough shit.

Of course.

I’m also opposed to DUI checkpoints.

Radio stations here have been reporting police speed traps since forever.
So, of course.

Let’s put some common sense in it. Most drunk drivers aren’t going to use Waze to look ahead at their projected travel path. Most don’t need a navigation app to get from their place of drinking to wherever they are going. Usually it is in very familiar territory. I know near me they set up DUI checkpoints on one particular road that gets a lot of traffic and has zero ways of turning off before the checkpoint. They set them up on festival weekends in town and they announce them on the TV. Yet every night of the festival they will catch 30 or 40 drunk drivers. I have seen drunk drivers stop in the middle of the road because they see the checkpoint ahead, realize what it is, and realize they have nowhere to go. So they just sit there. Eventually their foggy brains come to the sad realization that they are caught and they move forward again.
Yes, Waze has been available and can be used to identify where the cops are. But I don’t know how much that helps drunks.

Yes. In America, people are guaranteed the right to freedom of speech. If people want talk (or otherwise communicate digitally) about the location of police, then they absolutely have every right to do so.

I would add that seeing cops on an app like Waze is a deterrent of illegal behavior in itself.

@kritiper: On Waze, there’s often an indicator of hidden police on the highway I take to work every day. One might argue that there is no illegal activity when one knows there are police hidden. Everyone is going the speed limit or maybe a few miles above the speed limit.

Yes, they should.

It is a serious freedom of communication issue to prohibit people from sharing information on what the government is doing.

Police and the government are public servants, not angelic overlords.

Also it doesn’t “allow people to break the law” – knowing where a speed trap is does not mean the rest of the road is devoid of police, or people with cell phones who can report serious infractions.

(Also minor speed infractions are not serious crimes, and speed traps generally target even ordinary people who are technically over the legal limit but driving normally and safely but are endangering no one and doing what most drivers do much of the time as part of normal safe driving.)

A true “speed trap” (where a road that is normally highway speed has a short residential speed limit for the purpose of trapping people into speed violations) is borderline illegal by themselves, as they exist only to raise revenue.

Knowing a DUI checkpoint is out there may actually decrease the incidence of drunk driving,as people will make other arrangements. The local police agencies have an “avoid the thirteen” program in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they announce checkpoints and heightened enforcement during the Christmas and New Years Holiday.

Cops don’t like anyone knowing what they are up to. Tough.

Why not.
The State has the authority to set up a checkpoint.
You are entitled to take a different route to avoid it. What argument could be made that you were obligated to negotiate the checkpoint.

They shouldn’t broadcast the information if it’s illegal to do so and they don’t want to incur the penalty.

Moreover, why do ebriety and inebriety not have antonymous meanings.

Of course it should be allowed. Wasn’t this issue settled back in the CB radio craze? It’s not just the drunks who want to avoid the hassle and delay of sobriety check bottlenecks.