A dedicated Reporter does need to run the Policy Service, but it does not make Policy decisions and it does not maintain list updates, which can lead to confusion when it replies to Trace Requests in the WebAdmin.
When running a multi-server deployment, a dedicated Reporter Server does need to run the Netsweeper Policy Service in order to connect to the WebDB.
Your Reporter will not make any policy or category decisions and it does not need to connect to the CNS list update service.
However, because the policy service is running it will reply to a Trace Request, but because it is not connected to our CNS list update service it will sometimes reply with an incorrect category, most often the New URL category, (as shown in screenshot 01).
screenshot 01
As shown, the WebAdmin Server has correctly categorized the example URL as a redirector page, because its lists are up to date.
The Reporter still replies because the Policy Service is running, but it does not have the correct category for this site, because it is not receiving category updates from CNS.
A dedicated Reporter will never be responsible for categorizing live requests in a production environment, so there is no concern about it incorrectly filtering traffic.