From November 1, 2021, it will be illegal to report certain police checks, temporarily and in certain cases: driving assistance applications, such as Waze or Coyote to name a few, will have to put themselves in order to march and put an end to reports of police checks. The bill dates back to 2019 and is set to come into force at the end of the year. Will be concerned: alcohol and drug checks and roadblocks.
From November 1, 2021, the “rebroadcast of any message or indication sent by users of an electronic driving or navigation assistance service” may be prohibited “since this rebroadcast is likely to allow other users to escape control”, by the prefects and the Minister of the Interior.
Concretely, according to application decree n°2021-468 which has just been published in the Official Journal this Tuesday, police checks concerning alcohol and narcotics tests may become invisible for two hours on Waze, Coyote and any other traffic signal application. The roadblocks involved in the search for dangerous individuals may be invisible for 12 hours.
In June 2019, the National Assembly adopted the principle of this temporary blocking of the reporting of road checks, within the framework of the mobility law. In the event of non-compliance, the operators of the applications will be liable to two years of imprisonment and a fine of €30.000. Speed controls, the possible introduction of which had caused controversy, are not affected by this measure.
While many interventions, sometimes crucial and urgent, are slowed down precisely because of user reports, the system “allows the most dangerous individuals to be removed from the road”, in the event of a Kidnapping Alert, to “prison escapees, psychiatric hospital escapees, or for cases of terrorists, like the Kouachi brothers in 2015 who escaped the police for quite a while thanks in particular to the signaling that was possible on Waze », Explained Zivka Park, the LREM MP at the origin of the text.
It will be recalled that in 2020, during the first confinement, Waze was forced to block reports of police checks, used massively by people not respecting health measures.
