Hacker News Reader

Comment by mef | Hacker News Reader

When the police see a car and run the plate and it comes back stolen, how should they “confirm the car is really stolen”?

View on HN

Police generally hate stolen car license plates. This means things are about to get serious. Most police departments wont even attempt a pull over with just one unit. But most scary for the cop they have no idea who this person is. In the US you want to take stolen cars seriously [guns out]:

https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEB&search_query=police+...

For this purpose, they do not need to.

   if( car_theft->reporting_party == Hertz )
      car_theft->credibility = Probable_Clerical_Error;

A responsible course of action, given Hertz history of false accusations, would be to ignore “stolen” cars that belong to Hertz. It’s a lesser evil - even if it actually got stolen nothing bad will happen, Hertz is a wealthy company.

It can be as simple checking the registered owner of the car(Hertz), then checking the paperwork the renter has on hands and that should lower the suspicion and go from there.

They should probably confirm the car is stolen when they mark it as stolen.

The usual procedure is for the police dispatcher to check with the law enforcement agency that entered the license plate into the database.

In case of a rental car, a call to the local or corporate office of the rental company would also be appropriate, all the more so now that there’s wide publicity about the problem of false or out-of-date theft reports.

Yes, and calling Hertz would confirm the report that the car was stolen, because its Hertz calling the police in the first place.

In some cases, that might’ve been true, but in others, I expect Hertz, when confronted with a rental agreement number, vehicle number, and customer’s name, would have been able to confirm that the agreement was current and valid, making it obvious that the theft report was mistaken or outdated.

I normally rent from National/Enterprise, and I cant tell you the last time I got a printed rental agreement. As they say, its all in the app these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com