Hertz bug leads to people being erroneously arrested and jailed
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Last time I tried to cancel a reservation on the phone with them, it took almost an hour to convince the customer support that my reservation existed. During the course of this hour, they insisted several times that the reservation didn't exist. After about 20 minutes of this, I asked to speak to a manager and was flat out denied. Since their policy does not allow hanging up on a customer service call, I refused to get off the line until I was escalated to a manager, so over the next 30 minutes the support person called me several names, including "liar", "cheat", and told me to get off the phone and find something better to do.
Finally, I was escalated to the manager who managed to find my reservation and cancel it for me. Imagine my surprise a week later when I found out that my reservation had in fact not been cancelled and I had been charged hundreds of dollars regardless.
At this point I was fed up with their customer phone service, and resorted to emails instead. The same scenario played out again, and it took dozens of emails, credit card receipts, and 4 weeks of my time for them to finally refund me my money.
The whole experience was rather eye opening in an awful and surreal sort of way.
Edit: Learned about charge backs here on HN, I've contacted a cc company twice to request one and in both cases the charging company promptly reached out and resolved the dispute w/o actually needing to follow through.
That rule doesn’t apply to giant sophisticated companies that process a lot of transactions and have detailed rules, lengthy contracts or fare fules and so on like airlines or car rental companies. The CC companies are going to give them the benefit of the doubt in a different way.
The evidence Hertz provided was literally a letter that just said they provided services for 5 days, even though they provided me with a detective vehicle and charged me for 10 days.
I understand the point of contention on how much I should pay for a broken car, but I don't understand why American Express can't check that the time period is wrong. In the end, Hertz at least refunded the overcharged number of days because it was so easy to convince anyone paying attention that it was wrong ...
They absolutely do. I had to rent a car, last minute (like very very last minute), and went to Hertz (I usually use Enterprise). I booked online and Uber'ed to the rental place. They had billed my (business) card for a prepaid rental...
... and then wouldn't rent the car because I "failed" their ID / etc verification, "most likely because my ID profile wasn't tied to my card" (it's a business card, this doesn't seem like anything uncommon).
And then wanted to refuse my refund because it was prepaid.
So I ask for a car, pay for it, go to get it, you won't give it to me, and then you won't give my money back to me?
What if that manager wasn't actually a manager, but just a colleague of the first person? That person told you you that he found and cancelled your reservation just for you to get off the line.
I can't accept that. What happened here is that Hertz, as a rational and responsible entity, reported lawfully rented cars as being stolen, knowingly putting inocent customers in grave danger. It was not a computer that did it, there was a rational decision to let this critical task run without human supervision on a dodgy system with insuficient quality control.
What's next, Autocad glitch destroys sky scrapper? Windows Update sends passenger jet to fiery death? As soon as you take the rational decision to let life critical tasks run on software, you are vouching for the correctness of that software and it's appropriateness for the task and you are responsible if the software fails.
Genuinely I would love to see it work. I think it is cool, but I won't use it. I like driving and I like being in control of my destiny. Even if the risk is higher. That's what makes us human.
I have not seen any evidence of us being at that point today. Of course, the focus of these companies right now is on intra-urban transit, for reasons that make almost make sense from a revenue perspective.
At some point none of us have to use stupid inefficient cars anymore and would just beam from A to B
But self driving cars aren’t even aimed at rural areas anyways. Rural areas simply don’t have the traffic or parking problems that make self driving cars incredibly desirable in urban areas.
Where do most crashes overall occur?
As in all automation, the edge cases won't always apply, and the option to disable should be available.
https://stevecheney.com/handcuffed-and-under-surveillance/
Sounds awful.
he/she better be getting a multi-million dollar settlement!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver
The advice I've received in the past is to comply to the best of your ability, don't talk to the police, call your lawyer when you have a chance, and fight whatever there is to fight in court or in the media.
Reaching for something in your pocket instead of complying will probably get you hurt regardless of race.
(I am neither lawyer nor LEO)
Otherwise, being polite and not escalating is the safest approach. Because another aspect of traditional police training in the US is always out-escalating suspects.
Edit: What can I say? It clearly worked for this guy. Perhaps because he looks pretty harmless. But it's also worked for me. Because I also look pretty harmless, I guess.
Not true. Rewatch the original video. It covers exactly this.
There's a whole collection of well reasoned opinions why you should really shut the fuck up, when confronted with police[3]
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/05/01/shut-up-i-explained-mostl...
[2] https://www.popehat.com/2011/12/01/reminder-oh-wont-you-plea...
And your examples are mostly about people who had done something wrong.
So, I say, don't talk to the cops. Ask to speak with an attorney, and get competent advice before you answer the cops' questions. Are there mundane situations in which you might rationally decide to talk to the cops — say, if a neighbor's house is burglarized, and they come to ask if you saw anything? Sure. But you should view each interaction with the cops with an extreme caution bordering on paranoia, as you would handle a dangerous wild animal. When you talk to a cop, you are talking to someone who is often privileged to kill you with complete impunity, someone whose claims about what you said during your interaction — however fantastical — will likely be accepted uncritically by the system even if the particular cop is a proven serial liar. Even the most mundane interaction carries the potential for life-altering disaster.
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2014/01/15/the-privilege-to-shut-up/
And in TFA:
> According to ABC Action News, these affected customers ended up in handcuffs and in the back of a police car in the majority of the cases. A few people were even met with the business ends of a firearm and were taken into custody forcefully after disagreeing with police.
So with routine traffic stops, playing it cool is almost always the best bet. I've experienced scores of them, mostly for speeding, but some for reckless driving. And a couple for evading. And I've never gotten more than tickets.
One of those evading stops involved a county-wide APB :) I just said something like "Hey, I just saw "Dawn of the Dead", and got scared". Which was almost the truth, in that it was hypomania. They almost impounded the car, but eventually we all decided that it was funny.
Why do American police stop people so often? Every American here seems to have experience of being stopped and acts like it’s a super normal thing. I live in the UK and I’m don’t think I’ve ever even spoken to an on-duty police officer in my life. They don’t just cruise around stopping cars here.
And they also seem to think a cop pointing a gun at people they've stopped, or even shooting them for reaching into their pockets is also normal ("what did they expect?").
>I live in the UK and I’m don’t think I’ve ever even spoken to an on-duty police officer in my life. They don’t just cruise around stopping cars here.
Yeah, but you're not in the land of the "free".
Cops intentionally breaking tail lights is 99.999% something from Hollywood. I try and keep up to date on the various stupid abuses of power that happen at police departments throughout the country and I've never even heard of it happening. I thinks the notion of cops breaking tail lights probably predates the war on drugs (which gave them other ways to manufacture probably cause)
Nevertheless, tail lights weren't commonly LEDs until fairly recently and the styling that results in deeper housings also wasn't default until the mid 2000s. You can definitively break a tail light with the back end of a flashlight relatively easily though.
I'm sure you can imagine some jerk cop breaking a tail light on some 90s car because the person gave him lip and he can't find anything else to write a ticket for but jerk cops do all sorts of things and it's not really appropriate to use edge cases to reason about normal cases.
In many jurisdictions the real method involves human cops making deputized dogs perform ritualized tricks near the car.
In US culture, performing this ritual grants the human cops permission to arrest people.
LED lights are slowly reducing this, but I don't think I can do my 20 minute morning commute for a week without seeing at least one car with a burned out brake light. How is it possible that you've never seen or heard of it?
I experienced so many because I'm bipolar, and was taking an SSRI, which made me hypomanic, but with little affect.
So if a cop sees something, he has to react immediately. They cant simply go to your home afterwards as they dont always know where it is. And gun culture makes it impossible to know when some random dude is going to shoot you, especially when pissed off or drunk. So I can understand the cop paranoia.
Strange thing with social security numbers as pseudo-id happen there too. I wonder how they know who to tax over there.
It also depends a lot on your area. Where I live the cops to "real problems" ratio is pretty good. I'm basically free to go a safe and reasonable speed regardless of the speed limit. I'd have to do something really flagrant to get pulled over for it. In the wealthier cities and suburbs that the people of HN tend to live in you have many more bored cops looking for trouble where there is little to be found so they spend more time extracting revenue from motorists and making fishing stops.
And of course speed cameras don't bother you if you don't speed in the first place, so they don't catch people unless they're doing something wrong.
This happens all the time in rich areas. It's a plain and simple fishing stop.
>I've never seen a tail light out ever,
Because your government intentionally makes vehicle ownership so financially onerous that everyone who drives a car has the resources (time more than money) to get it fixed promptly. In the US, even in poorer areas it's not common but it's not uncommon. In a 40min rush hour commute in the winter (when it's dark and you can see everyone using lights) I could probably still count on one hand the number of head lights and tail lights I see out.
> This happens all the time. It's a plain and simple fishing stop.
You can't make a good first impression on a speed camera.
Overwhelming majority of fishing stops result in a warning because the cop realizes after getting a closer look at the vehicle and its occupants and realizing that there's nothing sketchy going on. And I say this as someone who's been subject to a heck of a lot of fishing stops because I tend to check the boxes that make me worth stopping (one time I had almost an entire PD stop me over the course of a month as they rotated through the shift and location that put them where I was driving at the time I was there).
I'd much rather have laws that go fishing than robots that enforce the law to the letter 100% of the time.
Please try not to be abusive.
> result in a warning because the cop realizes after getting a closer look at the vehicle and its occupants and realizing that there's nothing sketchy going on
If there's nothing sketchy going on... what are they getting a warning for?
> You can't make a good first impression on a speed camera... I'd much rather have laws that go fishing than robots that enforce the law to the letter 100% of the time.
I don't want people being let off because they make a good impression! That lets the police enforce laws based on their biases, such as race or gender. I'd much rather have simple factual enforcement. Either you were speeding or not.
As far as internet comments go I think it's more than a stretch to put "screw off" in the abusive bucket.
>what are they getting a warning for?
So the cop can have a paper trail proving he was awake and working.
>I don't want people being let off because they make a good impression! That lets the police enforce laws based on their biases, such as race or gender. I'd much rather have simple factual enforcement. Either you were speeding or not.
Automated enforcement of the letter of the law would instantly screw basically everyone. I don't think you understand how many letter of the law violations cops see every day and choose not to do anything about.
But not "as far as HN comments go". The community members, posting rules/guidelines, the user moderation system, dang, etc. work to foster friendly substantive discussions. Please help this effort.
This is how corruption, and racial profiling, and all manner of terrible things start.
You definitely DO want the laws enforced 100% without exception. It must be applied to those who write the law as equally as it does to everybody else. This is how laws get fixed.
Multiple reasons, but the big one is money. There are a lot of places smaller than big cities who have massive revenue problems. Turning cops into revenue generators seems to be the preferred solution.
And then come second-order effects: private probation enforcement companies, private prisons, communications monopolies for private prisons... and they all lobby to keep and expand their pound of flesh. And you get this:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/02/24/debtors-prison...
But hey, freest country on earth, amirite?
But the point about TFA stands. "[I]n the majority of the cases", people were not arrested.
It's the same reason mechanics tell you do do preventive maintenance even though they make way more money swapping out large components.
A lawyer helps ensure the innocent don't get screwed by a mistaken witness, a vindictive prosecutor, or a corrupt cop, and that the guilty don't get railroaded with a laundry list of bullshit charges. Money spent on a lawyer will generally pay dividends when you consider the cost of false convictions and false arrest - losing your job, bills going unpaid while you're behind bars (and the interest, penalties, evictions, and reposessions resulting from them), damage to your credit, trying to find a new apartment with an eviction on your record, having to get a new car, etc. All these factors combine to make people who go to jail far worse off when they get out, regardless of their guilt.
But if I get pulled over for some traffic offense, or even because some glitch has flagged my vehicle, I'm going to politely cooperate. While remaining noncommittal, of course. That's what FindLaw recommends.[0]
However:[1]
> Remain silent if arrested. If your traffic stop turns into an arrest, do not say anything to the police other than requesting an attorney. The police may try to get to volunteer information but refuse to say anything.[10]
0) https://traffic.findlaw.com/traffic-stops/what-to-do-during-...
1) https://www.wikihow.com/Answer-Questions-During-a-Traffic-St...
Or when you're dealing with police who are just looking for an excuse to arrest someone. The problem being, you don't know when you're dealing with one of those people.
No, though there is a it of a balancing act. It certainly isn't “never report a crime” or “never call 911 when a person is distress and cooperate with first responders when they arrive, even if those first responders happen to be police”. But it's a lot more than “never talk to the police when you know you are guilty”.
> So the main thing is that you don't want to lie about it, because they're trained to detect lies, and to manipulate you into contradicting yourself.
They are trained to manipulate you into contradicting yourself and will use that training if they don't like you, or if they suspect you are lying (and police aren't magical lie detectors, they are wrong a lot about their suspicions, in both directions), or for any number of other reasons, and lying to them is often a crime itself.
But about TFA, it's true that stealing vehicles typically results in arrest. And it's true that making substantive statements to police, without your lawyer present, is dangerous.
However, when you have in fact rented, and not stolen, the vehicle, it's fine to say that. And it's fine to say that you have the rental agreement in the vehicle. That should be enough to defuse the situation. Even if it takes a while, and even if you end up handcuffed.
Going immediately to "I want my attorney" is silly in those circumstances. If you've lost the rental agreement, or if you screwed up and didn't return the vehicle on time, then "I want my attorney" is the prudent course. But otherwise, it pretty much guarantees that you'll be arrested. And having been arrested can be problematic when seeking employment.
Talking to the police is gambling with your life. You might get lucky you might not.
I mean, he was handcuffed for awhile by the side of the road over a clerical error. That genuinely sucks. But if he ever does find himself actually incarcerated I bet he’ll learn the difference.
The idea of an algorithmic bug leading to false arrests is not exactly the worst case scenario I can imagine, but it's really close to the worst case scenario I can imagine.
Thankfully, they resolved it with a couple of (very confused) phone calls. Sounds like I got lucky.
Police never got in touch though, which makes me wonder if it was all a ruse. I'm not exactly going to chase up the police to find out.
Thanks to an EU agreement this is also valid for traffic tickets now.
What EU countries start to do is sharing the license plates files between countries.
I got a (non registered) letter in the mail 3 years ago from the federal police force in Belgium with no easy way to pay the fine (related to a speeding offense which I recognise I most likely did commit). Got them on the phone once but it came to nothing. (If a belgian cop reads this: I'm more than willing to pay :) ).
Interestingly, at the time, belgian plates caught speeding in France were not contacted so the agreement or its technical implementation were not reciprocal.
I also received a parking fine from Brussels city, which made payment simple & efficient via a SEPA transfer.
Europe is far less integrated than US HN users seem to think. Countries are sovereign, they simply choose to collaborate on parts of their legal framework, parts which can be different on a country by country basis.
For instance, Schengen (freedom of movement for visa holders of a member country, generally no border controls between them) is 22 EU countries PLUS Switzerland, Norway & others. Members still have the ability to reinstate full border controls if need be (was the case during the terrorist attacks in France & Belgium in 2015/2016).
License plates schemes and vehicles insurances (ironically, insurance certificate are called "green cards"...) are valid amongst the Council of Europe members (basically all of geographical Europe, Russia & Turkey included)
Just wanted to add that this license plate integration is going at full speed. My brother is a truck driver who carries stuff to Western Europe once every 2-3 weeks or so (we live in Romania). About a month ago he received a speeding ticket from the French authorities, translated in Romanian and with a photo of his face as he was driving the truck.
The interesting thing was that the fine was sent to his home/personal address, even though the truck is owned by my brother's employer, not by my brother directly. So on top of making the license plate/owner connection, it seems that for stuff like trucks some traffic authorities also have information about the private details of the drivers operating those trucks.
I answered them and tried to explain it, they haven't contacted me since then, but they didn't even bother to apologize. Seems to be pretty common these days...
Always keep the documents around for at least a year after renting a car; those are your evidence, and they can match them up with their internal records. (And they'll be the primary counter-evidence if they messed up said internal records)
When I finally found a Hertz store in another city, they had a long time to replace it because the rental wasn't found in the system and, for Hertz, it was not possible that I was with their car.
Let say that I, as an individual, report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone, and then I do it again, and again, and dozens more times, resulting in false arrests and jail time for law-abiding citizens.
I’m pretty sure this couldn’t happen. I’d end up in jail myself for filing false police reports before I got anywhere close to double digits. But when it’s a giant company, they make a statement about how it’s extremely rare and continue on with business as usual.
It’s often said that “corporations are people,” legally speaking. This is clearly wrong. Corporations occupy a much more privileged position than people in the legal world!
Plus I’m not even sure what you’re suggesting here...that we put the entire company on trial or in jail? Operate like that and you’ll quickly find the boundaries of innovation receding.
Ok, they’re many many people. Are the individuals who made these false reports being held responsible, then?
That’s the problem: if you try to hold the corporation accountable, people say that it’s made up of many individuals and most of them had nothing to do with the crime. If you try to hold the individuals accountable, people say that they were acting on behalf of the corporation and it’s not right to punish them alone.
I don’t know what the solution is, but allowing large companies to get away with crimes that would ruin my life if I committed them myself is not the way to go.
Secondarily, regulation of software quality when it can cause problems this big.
That can only end well. Have you seen government-quality software lately?
The worst part, for me at least, is I'm not even sure how you would sue Hertz for something like this. It's negligence resulting in false imprisonment, but not all false imprisonment tort statutes have negligence as a valid cause of action. There's also malicious prosecution and defamation, but that typically also requires intent, rather than just negligence or recklessness. I suppose that it could fall under the blanket "unfair business practices" tort, but the damages would probably be limited. In PA for example, you couldn't get more than $1,000 out of that claim.
This is an absurd set of factual circumstances, and there are almost no accountability structures in place to fight it. It's incredibly disheartening.
>The absolute impunity with which large corporations operate never ceases to amaze me.
Hertz is likely to wind up getting sued and settling. They are going to pay to make this right. If they don't then the lawyers will have a field day.
>Let say that I, as an individual, report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone, and then I do it again, and again, and dozens more times, resulting in false arrests and jail time for law-abiding citizens.
If the bug was doing this only for a particular jurisdiction then it would be ignored by cops like you weould be. If you had the geographic reach that hertz does you could probably report 30 cars stolen.
You’re right, if I spread out the reports, I probably could report 30 cars stolen before I get found out. Then what happens when law enforcement finds out? Are they going to ask me nicely to stop and let me spend a few hours’ wages settling with the victims? Hell no! I’ll probably spend the next ten years being extradited from one state to another, assuming the Feds ever let me go after convicting me for dozens of counts of interstate crime.
Hertz will probably wind up paying more than any normal individual would because Hertz has far more money. You can't extract blood from a stone but Hertz is no stone so the lawyers will sink their teeth in.
These people being arrested was likely not the result of intentional action or negligence by Hertz. If they're anything like every other BigCo this is a known low priority but that nobody expected could result in something like this so it hasn't been fixed.
You keep trying to compare this to some malicious or comically negligent individual filing police reports but that comparison is absurd because no individual has the massive reach that Hertz does so no individual could file 30ish false police reports without noticing whereas a corporation where everyone is just doing their job without seeing the bigger picture could do that.
My whole point is that the comparison should not be absurd. Giant companies get all the advantages of being treated as a single legal entity but with none of the downsides. They’re giant machines for laundering responsibility. What’s absurd is that you can falsely imprison people and get away with it clean because “everyone is just doing their job.”
You're on a board called Hacker News and you don't understand the difference between a known bug and establishing that bug as the root cause of bad things that are actually happening in production. I think you're being willfully ignorant for the sake of your own argument.
Everyone with a large code base has thousands of known bugs with low priority because they are now known to be negatively affecting the system. There simply are not the resources to fix all these bugs. Nobody knows which ones (if any) are can actually cause bad things to happen until those bad things actually happen and get traced back to one of the known, low priority bugs.
Simply put, they probably knew there was a bug, they didn't know that bug could ever lead to people being falsely imprisoned until it actually happened.
>They’re giant machines for laundering responsibility.
I generally agree with that.
>What’s absurd is that you can falsely imprison people and get away with it clean because “everyone is just doing their job.”
The cops bear some blame here too. Hertz didn't imprison anyone. Part of the cop's job is to act as a filter for BS police reports. When you pull someone over who claims to have legitimately rented the rental that should get you to start asking further questions. Two organizations screwed up here.
Mistakes do happen. If this was a one-off, or even a two or three-off, I could buy that. But at some point on your way to thirty false arrests, it stops being a regular mistake and starts being negligence. You can blame a computer glitch a couple of times, but after that it becomes your fault for trusting the known-glitchy computer.
How hard would having people double check be?
The proper analogy for an individual would be if someone with a mental impairment loaned a vehicle and then called the police. There would be consequences, but none would likely involve criminal (or possibly even civil) charges.
In the real world, mistakes do happen.
The thing is the potential fines they're going to face are nothing compared to the problems you'd face as an individual. They can easily mitigate such costs.
To your point, just this week Chicago Alderman Proco "Joe" Moreno was charged with "disorderly conduct, obstruction of justice and insurance fraud" for saying a woman stole his car after he lent it to her.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2019/5/15/18626936/ald-pr...
So much for everyone telling me that Hertz shouldn’t be culpable because they didn’t do it maliciously.
Isn't the legal concept here 'mens rea' 'a guilty mind'. In your case from the way you describe this you know you are doing what you are doing. The argument would be that in order for a company (or individual) to be liable the same way (if there is even that or a similar concept for a corporation) they would have to have a reasonable knowledge that something like this was happening and that they could prevent it given the large scope of rentals that they do. I don't think it's actually reasonable to expect that in millions of transactions everything can and will go perfect. It's simply not the same standard as for an individual that has much fuller control of the transaction.
You said after all 'report my car stolen when I've actually lent it to someone and then do it again and again'. So you know you had 'lent it to someone'.
Equivalent would be if you could prove that the branch manager did not simply make a mistake and not put the right paperwork in but that he knowingly called the police when he knew the car was lent out. In one case it's a mistake (or shoddy work) in the other (as in your example) it's intentional.
I’m sure it was a mistake. But after a couple of times, such mistakes graduate from “oops” to negligence. Why is Hertz not checking their records more thoroughly before reporting a car stolen? After the first dozen false arrests, why are they not poring over all of their camera footage and paperwork and interviewing every employee from the site where it was supposedly stolen before they report it to the police?
Once again I think when you are dealing with a very large number of transactions there will simply always be screwups. To insure zero defects would raise the cost of the good or service to an unacceptable level. It's bad but my opinion is it's not criminal.
What's interesting though is that the tech business (and software in particular) is probably the most vocal (say here on HN) when mistakes happen in some other business (or a software business that is not theres) but at the same time for what they do (their own product or service) they regularly turn out non perfect products and experiences that regularly annoy, aggravate and create problems for users. Now none of this gets people picked up by the police but who says that that in particular is the gold standard of 'bad thing to happen to someone'. I wouldn't want to be picked up by the police obviously but then again some companies crappy software can actually create much greater aggravation and harm than that police event.
Filing a false police report is criminal, literally. Writing bad software is not.
The root of my complaint is the massive inequity in treatment between individuals and large companies. If you want to argue that companies should be punished for making crappy software or that private citizens should get a pass when committing crimes, go for it, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about. The issue isn’t merely that Hertz gets away with this, it’s that they get away with it where you and I would not.
But remember, that you will have the "impunity" for only 1 in 100,000.
report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone
He's been a driving force in giving programmers in large organizations the vocabulary and ammunition to win arguments that lets them write proper software and not shitty software. If you find yourself writing Java in a bigco IT department and you want to introduce stuff like test driven development, code reviews, or whatever else is just proper engineering practices, reading/watching some Uncle Bob is probably going to help you convince your coworkers and bosses.
He has some rather controversial ideas (eg he believes that "flow"/"the zone" is bad and programmers should never be in it), but you don't need to agree with all of it to learn something useful.
Software development shouldn't be a one-person job, that way, accidents are never a one-person responsibility. And criminal code should be caught in its tracks, too.
"However, the penalties for falsely accusing someone of a crime range from none at all to potentially decades behind bars. It all depends on how the accusation is made, the intent of the accuser, and what is being accused."
https://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2017/03/is-it-a-crime-to-f...
Furthermore, you'd think that after word got out about this happening several times, the police would start to look at lot more sceptically at an auto-generated Hertz stolen car report.
Whenever someone would find a security person to "report their car stolen" first order of business was to walk them around the car park and to check for their car on the CCTV cameras.
I don't think I ever came across a genuine stolen car incident. The lack of scepticism on the part of the police here is mind blowing.
That's not really applicable here, because Hertz doesn't seem to have accused anyone. It sounds like Hertz, either due to badly designed procedures or employees taking shortcuts, can lose track of which car a renter has been loaned.
This leads them to find that a car that their system says is not rented out and so should be on the lot is missing [1]. They then report that missing car to the police.
The person with the car gets detained and maybe arrested because they were found in possession of property reported missing by the owner, not because they were accused of anything by Hertz. So at most Hertz would face civil liability under some kind of negligence theory.
[1] In most of these cases, the same lot with the missing car should also have an extra car present that their records say is out with a renter, so the total number of cars in the lot should match their records. There should be a sanity check somewhere that says if the total is correct, but a car is "missing", then they should identify the extra car, contact the renter who supposedly is out driving it around, and find out if that person somehow got the missing car.
We're playing with words. That's an implicit accusation, our car is missing and we believe someone stole it. Furthermore, the last person to rent it out was X.
I'm sure you can spin this around legally, but the spirit of the interdiction against false accusations applies, one should not be able to play with the power of law enforcement and cry 'wolf' in jest, it's a critical public resource with grave consequences.
"However, almost every time, erroneously charged renters are still fighting the charges they received in court and all the fines that come along with them."
These cases should have been resolved immediately. There's a growing impression that once the criminal justice system gets hold of you, you are not leaving without paying for something, whether real or not -- see also the recent case of people falsely accused on account of NYC's bogus DNA testing.
This surely is the bit that makes it unacceptable - mistakes happen, but if they do I would expect Hertz to step up, apologise like hell, sort everything out with the law, and pay a substantial "sorry" payment. How are these people still in trouble? Is this a case of Hertz refusing to accept liability because they are scared of law suits or something?
I mean look at the DMCA and the thousands of invalid takedowns happening on e.g. youtube. Different thing though because it's not a legal accusation, people don't get arrested over it, etc.
A person had to call the police and declare the car stolen, right? That person filed a false report if they were not 100% sure the car was not stolen.
Let's hope there's not a REST API for reporting stolen cars.
Looking for heads to roll isn’t productive IMO, it’ll just end with scapegoats. I’m more interested in systemic changes to keep this from happening again. Although I do think it would be worthwhile to see if anyone tried to cover this up.
Rolling heads are effective deterrents. People should be really afraid of such a bug hapening in their system.
Look at the safety culture amongst pilots vs doctors for an example.
Perhaps if doctors were held so directly accountable, there would be fewer incidents of medical malpractice.
What do you mean by "directly accountable"? Doctors do get sued for malpractice regularly and that sounds pretty direct. Also how do you define an "incident of malpractice"? Many lawsuits are entirely frivolous so the definition cannot be initiated lawsuits. Also the lawsuits can be very expensive and representationally damaging, so the definition can't even be lawsuits that ended in settlements (since that can make sense regardless of validity). So frankly the situation seems much more complicated to even measure than many let on.
Ignoring that those issues, if doctors were held to higher account for the mistakes they make, you probably would expect some drop in malpractice (however you measure it). However you should also expect fewer doctors to do risky procedures. The overall result would not necessarily clearly be a net win for society even if malpractice were to drop. Incentives are complicated.
But criminal charges? Maybe if people were getting killed over it. Otherwise it's just a civil matter.
Edit: fat fingers
But consider medical malpractice. Even when a surgeon screws up, and the patient is disabled for life, there are rarely criminal charges. And this is lots more indefinite than that. I mean, you're going to put some employee in jail because they screwed up paperwork?
We put people in jail for drinking too much when that leads to bad consequences, why not for sloppy paperwork that get someone falsely imprisoned or killed?
Which is exactly why it should not be easily accessible. The false positive rate is too high, and breaches the presumption of innocence. (I'm not saying arrest records should not exist, though. It's very useful for the cops themselves. I'm just saying that non-cops should not have easy access to such files.)
Alternatively, we could have a perfect police which never arrests innocent people. But if we could have that, we wouldn't even need judges. Just have the cops be street judges, and let them condemn or release people on the spot.
Obviously, this would give too much power to the police. Judicial errors would soar through the roof. But this arrest record thing is exactly like that. By arresting you, they can stain your record for a long time, possibly permanently. The influence that has on your life afterwards is similar to a full blown conviction's.
Once when I had evidence of their mistake on paper the clerk stared at the ceiling and said "I'm not looking at that" like some kind of toddler.
Use National/Enterprise. Same price, 100x better service.
You'd think it would be a pretty easy thing to say, yo look at all this. It would seem unlikely an actual car thief would have a bunch of paperwork / make a bunch of paperwork with their own information on it.
Granted most cops aren't super detectives but even the non curious types know enough to ask the right questions even if only to help the suspected criminal incriminate them-self, going down the path of what all that paperwork even is would seem to work there too.
The cop actually (probabbly already doubting it) took me seriously when I said "no man that wasn't me" and I pulled up my credit card app and showed him a charge pending and he was all apologetic and said "yeah sorry about that". It was a quick discussion, no big deal.
One of those crimes I think only a random rural-ish suburb tries to deal with ;)
But at least that was a case where the cop actually decided not to do anything after I showed him something. Normally I wouldn't expect anything serious to go that way as if a cop wants to arrest you... they're probabbly going to do it no matter what you say, and talking (especially if it is serous) is not going to help.
But the car thing ... like any paperwork seems like it should help / make the cop wonder a bit.
Thank God it wasn't America, apparently.
The future I fear isn’t 1984 nor Brave New World; it’s Brazil, and it looks like it’s already here.
I doubt I could file a false report and get away with it. Why aren’t the state AGs holding Hertz accountable?
How about the CEO who made a rational policy of reporting vehicles stolen that aren't returned within a given time frame?
How about the engineers who created and approved a system with a software bug? A piece of software that functioned correctly 99.99969% of the time. That's slightly better than six sigma. How many of you can claim your uptime is that good. 30 cases in 10 million!
How about the product manager who crafted a spec with a hole in its business logic?
How about the front desk clerks who did not fill out the appropriate paperwork after rental upgrades?
How about the stores' managers who actually called the police and filed the reports in accordance with company policy?
How about the HR reps who didn't train employees to use the system correctly?
> Some of these were reported last year, and Hertz found itself paying tens of thousands of dollars in damages to victims in civil cases.
It seems the company is being held civilly liable. Which they should be! If the police shoot innocent people based on accusations then you have a POLICE problem not a Hertz problem (which, of course, never happened in this case).
If a corporation gets rights as a person, it should be held and jailed like a person for its crimes.
However, some people spent two weeks in jail while Hertz "resolved" this with the police.
It's only appropriate to assume that people (at Hertz) who don't know how to manage just their website, can least be expected to deliver underlying critical systems.
Keep paper records with you at all times when renting something.
Seriously should be a felony to posses a device designed to remotely shut down an automobile.
Digital is OK until you run out of battery or anyone refuses to accept your phone as proof.
When you hire a car you are just hiring a several-thousand-dollars item from a stranger. Either you take it seriously (and have a paper trail, hence) or you do not understand the risks.
It is all about risks.
The police and local politicians feel that most visible way to fight crime is to pull people over for any and all violations flagged by ALPR this will happen more and more.
Did I mention that the City is a heavily visited tourist City?
Expect more armed stops by police on "stolen" cars as well.
Sadly there is zero thought given to privacy "protections" either for the data.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hertz-will-sell-1-billion-...
Our legal system sucks. Once you're in it you're assumed to be some kind of dirtbag and to some degree you'll always be impacted.