Filing a false police report is a crime, it would be nice to see that enforced against the company in one way or another.
If you steal $100 from work you go to jail. If work shorts you $100 in pay, your gonna need to get your own lawyer. Citizens are not given the benefit of the doubt against entities that only exist on paper and don’t suffer real consequences. It’s backwards to put it lightly.
Justice should focus first on making victims whole, then on rehabilitating the perpetrators to prevent victimization in the future. Imprisonment serves neither of those goals.
Meanwhile we do the equivalent of charging a $90 penalty for a crime that earned $100.
Sending people to prison for committing crimes is "fucked up"? We can quibble over which crimes deserve what sentence, but we shouldn't outright dismiss the possibility of imprisoning white collar criminals.
Unironically, yes. Prison is super fucked up.
Prison time barely acts as a deterrent. It doesn't reform criminals. It has high costs for taxpayers.
American prisons are entirely inhumane. Even heard of prison rape? Even violent criminals shouldn't have to endure what goes down in there. With modern technology, house arrest is far better.
Even for extremely violent criminals who are a existent danger, prison is not right. They should be in mental hospitals.
What? Why aren't career criminals more brazen in their acts, if not for fear of punishment (which means: prison)?
I totally get the point that you can't just increase the prison sentence and expect the deterrence to scale, but suggesting that punishment "barely acts as a deterrent" sounds insane, especially when we're talking about calculating criminals like Hertz executives. It's not like they have the uncontrollable urge to make false police reports because of some weird psychological defect.
Those are all nice-to-haves, but justice is an equal exchange of bad things done by you to bad things done to you.
The punishment of prison should be entirely limited to losing your independence and the dignity that comes with it. It should literally be like childhood "time out". These are still human beings and we owe it to them to treat them like people, they just need to be silo'd off from society for a bit sometimes.
This isn't a matter of teaching the executives of Hertz that no, they don't need to commit crimes to survive, and how to access alternative means of survival, and all that.
They did this because they were greedy, lazy, and they knew they wouldn't suffer much for it. When you're dealing with white-collar sorts of crimes like this, deterrence is a thing.
There are plenty of alternatives that don't involve locking people in cells - and that are probably more effective a deterrent.
I am sorry if your false report causes someone to go to jail, then you need to go to jail as well
Guess which ones get taken a lot more seriously.
So, prison. Maybe a slightly nicer prison, but you're still taking their freedom away.
People pay tons of money to avoid prison, even temporarily - see lawyers, bail, etc. Same goes for getting prison sentences reduced, even just in part, to house arrest and probation.
Just what amount of fines, house arrest, and probation is going to be more effective a deterrent than prison?
I think there's a reasonable discussion to be had about where the line is between 'enough' deterrence and excessive punishment, but it's a bit absurd to claim that things people happily accept in lieu of going to prison will be more of a deterrent than prison.
The perpetrators are the employees at Hertz that made the decision. Issuing a fine to the company does not rehabilitate or penalize the decision makers.
I see where you're coming from in general, but the standard for non corporate executives is imprisonment. Even if it's a "fucked up idea", it's the status quo.
Arguing against imprisonment in the context of corporate criminals doesn't do anything to change that status quo. Rather it just helps perpetuate the dual class justice system where the upper class gets respect and treated like humans while the faceless lower class gets draconian sentences to be "tough on crime".
Or phrased differently: without prison sentences the whole situation becomes a pure numbers game: did they get more money out of the false reports/not fixing the bugs causing this misbehavior then they now have to pay in damages.
These kinds of crimes will continue to become the baseline if there are no real consequences to the people actually being responsible for the deeds (this includes the CEO).
On what authority are you making this proclamation?
What else do you do, make them pay a fine that's just a rounding error on their checking account? Having them wear orange instead of pinstripes for a similar number of days will get their full, undivided attention.
It doesn't help past victims, it helps future victims. Turns out, people do things that hurt other people if it will 1) benefit them and has 2) never resulted in any consequences.
> People have some really fucked up ideas of justice.
That people who have harmed other people face imprisonment is not one of them.
> rehabilitating the perpetrators to prevent victimization in the future.
Will this be done with a magic wand?
b) deterrence is important, especially in cases like this: if there are consequences for willfully ignoring something that causes severe harm to others, it's less likely to be willfully ignored in the future. If you can expect to only have to make others whole (if caught), it's a lot easier to just not care. And legal compensation rarely actually makes people whole.
Retribution: punish the offender. In the state of nature, if someone offended against you, you could hurt or kill them. Now, the state has a sanitized responsibility to fill that role.
Rehabilitation: give the offender time to think about and learn from his offense.
Isolation: remove the person from society for a while so that if rehabilitation fails, society is still relieved from having to deal with the offender’s misbehavior for a time.
Disincentivization: give others an idea of what would happen if they were caught doing a similar offense.
None of these overlap with “making the victim whole,” which is probably why there is a whole separate system of civil law for that which has nothing to do with punishment (excluding, of course, exemplary damages).
If you think there is no excuse for incarceration, then I’m curious how you’d propose handling the problems of sanitized retribution, isolation, and disincentive for crime. It seems pretty obvious (to me) that the world would be pretty gnarly if unrehabilitated criminals lurked among us, free to perpetrate crimes until an angry victim killed them just because they made a business decision that their crimes outweighed the civil penalty, and would be criminals saw this behavior and got the idea that it would be good for them to emulate the successful, unpunished offenders.
That said, a focus on rehabilitation for those who are deemed possible to rehabilitate seems reasonable to me.
Unless it was done wilfully, this just perpetuates the American fetish for imprisonment. They should be fired. They should be fined. And they should be deeply investigated, to confirm there wasn’t intent.
Throwing people in jail for literally throwing innocent people in jail, destroying their careers, and stripping them of their basic human rights is far from fetishizing it.
Letting people get away with crimes simply because they're part of a corporation is simply stupid.
"Someone told me to do it" is not an excuse for criminal behaviour, and neither is "We constructed a bureaucracy that results in us engaging in criminal behaviour".
No one important at Wells-Fargo went to jail either - they set policies which were expected to have certain outcomes, but top brass could not have possibly have foreseen the outcomes. I'm sick of plausible deniability, especially when it isn't even plausible any longer, the complaints go back years.
Those customers should obviously get their judgment money, and Hertz should pay a heavy price (maybe even such a heavy price that they go bankrupt), but no one should go to jail for filing a false police report unless they intended to mislead the police.
Maybe it was a "bureaucratic error" that fraudulently reported the cars as stolen. That bureaucracy didn't spontaneously emerge from dust. Humans built it.
Why should humans not face legal repercussions for the havoc they've wreaked on their victims' lives?
Declaring a car stolen by mistake shouldnt be the end of the world. One day someone with the same name as me committed an offense and I was wrongly given to the police of my country, and it took 5 minutes to clear me and nothing happened.
> A Hertz spokesperson told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2020 that the company has no “mechanism” to withdraw reports and does not do so because “In the rare instances this happens, if you report a crime, and you later say it didn’t happen, then law enforcement tends not to believe you if you retract it or say you were mistaken,” the spokesperson said. “Hertz’s continued good relationship with law enforcement is important.” [0]
It seems like there is plenty of intent there. The intent to continue lieing to police to protect Hertz's reputation at severe cost to Hertz's victims.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/04/11/hertz-stolen...
Are you able to find the source of that quote? It’s so outrageous, and is so not something that a corporate spokesperson would say, that I wonder if it’s somehow been taken out of context. Or if it even happened.
> Hertz has no mechanism to withdraw a criminal referral because, the company spokesperson said, it has to maintain a relationship of “integrity and responsibility” with law enforcement
Aug 4th: https://web.archive.org/web/20200804074215/https://www.inqui...
Aug 6th: https://web.archive.org/web/20200806004611/https://www.inqui...
The original version of the article did have the fuller quote:
> Hertz has no mechanism to withdraw a criminal referral because, the company spokesperson said, it has to maintain a relationship of “integrity and responsibility” with law enforcement.
> “In the rare instances this happens, if you report a crime, and you later say it didn’t happen, then law enforcement tends not to believe you if you retract it or say you were mistaken,” the spokesperson said. “Hertz’s continued good relationship with law enforcement is important.”
>"A Hertz spokesperson, who asked not to be identified, said that payments or even the eventual recovery of the car did not wipe away what it views as the original theft."
That is bizarre. I am a reporter; I cover news. The spokespeople of major corporations don't request anonymity. Anonymity is reserved for sensitive sources. It's literally the job of a spokesperson to speak on behalf of a company. They don't seek anonymity.
The second version of the article doesn't include the statement that Hertz's spokesperson requested anonymity. Which makes me think that the original source was either not a spokesperson at all, or that they might have been speaking without authorization.
The comment is still weird, but in the context of that article, Hertz doesn't come across that poorly, IMO. If you rent a car, and the rental company asks that it be returned after your rental period is over, going to the point of calling you multiple times, sending you letters, sending you a letter via Certified Mail, and finally trying to repo the car — all before reporting the car as stolen... well... that's kind of on you when the car is subsequently reported as stolen. Even if you kept paying for it. No? People don't have the right to unilaterally extend their rental period. According to Hertz, in 100% of cases, they did all of the above prior to reporting vehicles as stolen.
> Saleema Lovelace, who was arrested at gunpoint two days before the date on which she had agreed to return her rental car to Hertz.
> Connie Totman, who rented a car from Hertz in South Carolina and returned the car in Georgia. Hertz subsequently overcharged Ms. Totman in error and falsely reported the vehicle as stolen to South Carolina police.
In the latter case they reported the car as stolen after it had already been returned! The mind boggles.
Don't worry, that happens. Hertz will not hesitate to call you, saying that the credit card used for the rental has been maxed out, and could you supply a different credit card.
Always keep your receipts.
That's great that worked well for you, but in America, I don't have enough faith in cops for that to work out.
The prevailing attitude is that cops have to be "tough on crime", and if some false positives end up happening and an innocent person goes to jail for a few days until their name gets cleared, that's fine. In the mean time, they'll try to find SOMETHING to charge them with.
Land of the free, indeed.
(Speeders, drunk drivers and violently abusive parents rarely intend to kill people but we still have laws on the books to treat such cases adequately.)
This is a settlement, not a judgement.
[1] And whether people like it or not, Hertz clearly thought this system worked at the time they reported the "stolen" cars; just like software developers think their buggy code works until the user reports or crash telemetry come back.
They can not claim poor record keeping and ignorance as an excuse for filing false reports, they SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, which is part of the intent standard in most jurisdictions
1, 2, even 10 reports ok... they suck. 100's of false reports, that is beyond simple clerical error it would not take much to convince a jury that intent is there. i.e they internally setup the process that lead to false reports being filed likely as a say to cut costs
Flipping it around: would you feel comfortable calling the police to report that criminal negligence? Or would you be worried about getting in trouble for a false report?
The system is tilted towards non-prosecution, and for some very good reasons. No one's going to jail here.
>The system is tilted towards non-prosecution, and for some very good reasons. No one's going to jail here.
yes for high profile corporate execs it is, if some Teenager reported his car stolen but then found out a friend borrowed it, not only would the teen reporting the crime go to jail, but the teen that borrowed it likely would still be prosecuted for theft at the same time
Kinda like "resisting arrest" charge that is still valid even when there is no underlying crime to resist arrest from....
Your idea of " system is tilted towards non-prosecution" only exisit for one socio-economic class of citizens
1. Would a Reasonable person believe the system would lead to false reports
2. Were there any engineers or people internal to the company raising concerns that were ignored by managers / executives (I believe there likely was and there is more than enough probable cause for police to get a search warrant to find out)
3. After the first reports came in what actions were taken by the company
To be blunt: be real. No one at Hertz is going to jail over this. They fucked up, and have admitted so as part of this settlement. That's all the justice you're going to get. I'm sorry.
your real world does not match mine, because in my world corp execs routinely ignore the advice of engineers, administrators, and developers when it comes to things like Security....