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Comment by kaendfinger | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if this happened to you, assuming this is true. The settlements should be big and somebody at Hertz should go to prison for at least a medium amount of time, effectively it’s filing a false police report.

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There were multiple failures here, and not just with Hertz. How on Earth did someone spend 2 weeks in jail on this? This was a bug so they clearly had no evidence except their word. The actions of the police here warrant just as much scrutiny and reflection as Hertz.

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.

> Looking for heads to roll isn’t productive IMO, it’ll just end with scapegoats

Rolling heads are effective deterrents. People should be really afraid of such a bug hapening in their system.

Rolling heads lead to slopey shoulders. If the consequence of a mistake is so severe, people tend to shift blame rather than look for root cause.

Look at the safety culture amongst pilots vs doctors for an example.

Pilots are held directly and immediately accountable every moment when they’re in the air. If don’t fly safe, their heads will roll not due to any laws of man, except maybe one Sir Isaac Newton.

Perhaps if doctors were held so directly accountable, there would be fewer incidents of medical malpractice.

> 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.

What safety culture among doctors? More seriously when pilots mess up they’re not around to strenuously defend themselves while a doctor who never killed anyone never practiced.

That's my point: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/from-a-blame-culture-...

It's actually the opposite. Rare but harsh punishment doesn't deter crime a lot. However frequent but light punishments are very effective. After someone goes to prison for 10 years that person is already used to prison. You can no longer change the behaviour of such a person through further deterrents.

The whole article is about proverbial heads rolling over car theft. There turned out to be no theft and innocent heads rolled. Doing the same thing to some poor Hertz clerk isn't justice.

Whatever Hertz did or didn't do to let this happen (albeit rarely) is their fault. So plaintiffs clearly have grounds to sue Hertz. Police departments were also affected, so they arguably also have standing.

But criminal charges? Maybe if people were getting killed over it. Otherwise it's just a civil matter.

Edit: fat fingers

Taking an action that deprives someone of their liberty for two weeks? Sounds criminal to me. Doesn't to you? As has been pointed out there are multiple failures including law enforcement.

Hertz inadvertently kidnapped someone for 2 weeks. I'm sure kidnapping is a crime we can hold the Hertz executives up to.

If I spend 2 weeks (or even 2 hours) in prison due to someone's false accusation, I'd also want to press for criminal charges.

I get that. I'd feel that way too.

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?

Yes? Why the hell not, it's pretty obvious that such paperwork has life and death consequences (it's only a matter of time before a customer is shot during his arrest, because the cop "feared for his life").

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?

Intent matters a lot re criminal charges.

As does negligence. If I'm target shooting from my house to a target across a busy road, if I accidentally shoot someone, I'd expect to go to jail even if it was a simple mistake.

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