Electric Car owner charged for stealing electricity from school | Hacker News Reader

Electric Car owner charged for stealing electricity from school

usatoday.com

31 pointsjusben136975 comments

Maybe it's because Canada is so cold (at this exact moment the temperature is minus 20C with a foot or two of snow on the ground) and block heaters in cars were the norm for so long, but just about every parking lot (that isn't in a shopping centre) has electric outlets here. At schools, apartment buildings, etc.... When I park my car at the University there's electric outlets for every single stall (of course nowadays most cars start easily without block heaters).

Electricity is cheap enough that being able to 'plug in' is generally acceptable anywhere, except where explicitly forbidden...

It's interesting. Putting aside the actual value and concentrating on the behavior. If a driver knew that a school keep gasoline for filling up buses or other purposes and went and topped up his car while his son played tennis he/she would be fully aware that they were stealing. They may still do it, but it wouldn't make the papers and/or they wouldn't act surprised if they were caught "Oh can't anyone take the petrol if they need it?"

A closer analogy would be taking water from an outside tap, which again putting the value aside (even though it's much closer), people would be highly surprised to see someone arrested for theft of water and would actually think that outside taps in a public place might be intended to be used by the public who have access to the facilities.

Now lets say I put a small electric motor on that tap and turn it on for a few hours so I can charge my phone or a few days to charge my car?

(don't think I didn't toy with the idea when I lived in an apartment with water included in the rent but not electricity).

Even better, if hot water is included in your rent, run a hose to a radiator and back to the sink for free heat.

This is a good analogy. For reference, a Telsa Model S is like lining up 14,000 people to take a sip. An iPhone is one person.[1] So, in this case the issue is what happens when you exploit a social norm by 3x orders of magnitude? One the one hand its a "hack", on the other its "opportunistically, selfishly gaming the system". YMMV.

[1] This is back of the envelope, 5.77wh vs 85kwhr.

FYI, it was a Nissan Leaf according to the article, not a Tesla. The Leaf has a more modest 24 kWh battery. (So you're really only lining up ~4,000 people and only letting the first few hundred take a sip.)

I know people turn on the taps in schools and leave them running after they leave, letting the water flow uselessly while no one is there. My high school had plenty of broken urinals that were constantly running water, or had the plunger stuck down. Someone may get detention for that stunt, but never arrested.

The difference here is the perception: while everyone knows petrol is an expensive good, many people don't view electricity as something stealable - it's not really tangible, and you're dealing in amounts that can be fractions of a cent.

How much does an electric car cost to charge?

I don't know the specs of US wall outlets, but on a standard European wall outlet with 16A @230V a charge time of 20 minutes (as in the article) should give a energy consumption of approximate 1 kWh (US should be 16A @110V IIRC, so the power consumption is 0.5 kWh), given a price of 10 ct/kWh we have a cost of 10 cents.

Now, if you count in the time cost for law enforcement (15 hours in jail, the petrol from picking up the suspect and re-delivering him home, multiple hours of paperwork), the cost of enforcement is likely to be tens of thousands times more expensive than the value of the "stolen" goods. But hey, the US aren't exactly known for applying common sense in law enforcement. And anyone placing a open wall outlet without a lock on a totally public area (a parking lot!) is not in any position to whine later on.

Nit: disproportionate retaliation is a rational strategy against aggregate loss.

The classic example is, your neighboring tribe steals a goat. You could chase after them, but then there'd be a confrontation, and some of your people would probably get killed. It's not worth a life for a goat. But then next week, and the week after, and the week after that, another goat is stolen. Each week the same calculus holds: one goat is much less than one life. In the aggregate, though, you've lost dozens or hundreds of goats. Too many.

On the other hand, you can respond to the theft of a goat disproportionately. You can chase after the thieves, confront them, beat them, kill them. Some of your people will die, some of their people will die. Next week, they don't come back to steal a goat. A goat isn't worth one of them dying over, either. Your tribe has a reputation of "not to be messed with", and the thefts stop.

It may be the horrific underpinning of all types of warfare, from gang to nation-state, but it is pretty rational, and provides a solid reason to spend a thousand bucks prosecuting a 5-cent theft: it's not about punishing the 5-cent theft, it's about preventing the future aggregate theft of thousands of dollars.

Actually in studies about this topic, the "proportionality" or harshness of the sentence does little to nothing to deter the crimes (more than a nominal sentence). What does prevent crime is making the apprehension of a suspect guaranteed after a crime has been committed. In other words, even if the sentence is nominal, if the thief knows that he'll be caught for sure, he'll be less likely to commit the crime. If the thief knows there's a chance he won't be caught, he'll be more likely to commit the crime, even if the sentence is very harsh.

This is one of the reasons why there's movement to undo the mandatory minimum sentences and harsh sentencing trends that have arisen in the past 20 years - because it doesn't actually deter crime.

For this particular case, if the school had simply put up signs saying the outlets are monitored and you'll be fined for any misuse would have probably done the trick without resorting to actual police intervention.

I think you're probably right. Disproportionate response only makes sense if it actually prevents future crimes.

I would like to clarify the blurring of two disproportionate costs.

The first is the cost to the criminal. Assume for the sake of argument that in this case we're talking a trip to the police station, a $50 fine, and 10 hours of community service. Absurd for a $0.05 theft of electricity, but a limited sort of absurdity. The criminal is made to pay a disproportionate amount in restitution for his crime.

The second is the cost to the society. The cost of having a police man arrest someone for a $0.05 theft, jail him, take him to court, and supervise the community service. Hell, the cost to cash the $50 check for the fine is probably more than $0.05. The society pays a disproportionate amount to prevent a $0.05 crime.

These two separate costs have two separate objections. The first violates our inherent notions of fairness; the second raises the question of cost effectiveness.

While a rational strategy for defending a goat it does not apply for someone stealing a grape. There both food, but a two order of magnatude loss may be worth it a four order of magnatude loss is probably not.

Edit: Which is why fines are used for minor offences they dramaticly reduce the cost of enforcement. And really refilling an electric car is about the same cost to society (1-2$) as someone not paying a parking meter so the response should be vary similar.

Nope, not paying a parking meter has more of a social cost attached - you're keeping people wanting to pay for parking from a parking lot, forcing them to drive around more and lose time.

Certainly that's the rationale that the smarter prosecutors will eventually produce, after we're all bored of hearing about "the rule of law" from the same people who regularly do so much to undermine it. At some price level for electricity, that rationale would even make sense. However, it's far from clear that we're at that price level.

A parking lot is a public amenity. (Some lots are restricted to authorized people or even charge for use, but that's beside the point.) That amenity often includes anywhere from one to several dozen bright electric lights, that are on from dusk until some time after close of business, or even until morning. No one is charged for the kWh that lighting consumes, as that is understood to be part of the cost of operating a parking lot.

Or in this case you could divert the funds used in prosecution to secured covers for the outlets. Same outcome, no further use of the resource, with a reduced cost to everyone involved.

Regarding your last paragraph, I must disagree with the implication that the U.S. should not enforce crimes that cost more than the damages that were done. First, the officer's time is already a sunk cost. The real cost is the opportunity cost of not patrolling while filling out paperwork. ("Don't you have REAL criminals to find?") If anything, this should be weighed against the deterrent for future crimes (e.g. Punishing 1 thief prevents 1,000 other thefts). Secondly, this would set a bad precedent for law enforcement. Most crimes aren't worth the ~$10,000 in time and materials spent working any case. What about crimes that can't be dollarized? Trespassers don't cost property owners any money, but the owners still expect law enforcement support in removing the trespassers.

I don't agree that plugging into an open outlet is stealing, and I believe that the charges (pun not intended) will be dropped excepting a verbal wrist-slap to not do it again. Perhaps in the future the school will either restrict access to the outlet or provide a sign that forbids electric vehicle charging.

I must disagree most strenuously with your last sentence. A person does not need to take steps to secure his belongings in order to have the right to complain about theft. Leaving the stuff unlocked is not particularly wise, but theft is still theft when it's easy, and the victim still has a right to his property.

Public electricity supplies on parking lots are on the rise - I personally would consider a wall outlet on a parking lot without a lock or sign as a free-to-charge-my-car outlet.

Around here, all such supplies have clear signage that they're available to the public. Maybe it's different where you are?

Where is "here"? I've lived all over the USA and in various other nations, and the only place I've seen signs like that is inside the secured zone at certain airports.

They're all over the place in Northern Virginia, and I saw a bunch in California when I was there recently too. They look something like this: http://www.blogcdn.com/green.autoblog.com/media/2012/12/publ...

Well that's a non sequitur. We're talking about a standard NEMA 5-15 receptacle, which have seen wide use for decades. In the parking context, they're often used in cold climates to ensure that the vehicle will start sometime before spring. Now you show us a picture of one of these new EV doodads that might not even have a standard plug. What is that supposed to mean? The creation of a new technology doesn't change the implicit understanding that millions of people have about really old technology. However, it might mean that managers of public spaces who have their drawers on a bit too tight, ought to buy either a sign or some padlocks.

I've never seen anyone charging an electric car from a standard NEMA 5-15 receptacle. So maybe that was what you were talking about, but it's certainly not what "we're talking about".

I don't think I've ever seen one of those receptacles made available for public use in parking garages. Presumably it's something from a colder climate than where I live. Note that the incident we're discussing happened in Georgia, where such things are not needed.

If that were the case (it's not, but whatever) the bigger scandal would be a public middle school that has spent tens of thousands of public dollars to install a public charging station with no provision for public access. Who gets to use the station? What are they paying?

Perhaps I'm being unclear. I'm just saying that the public charging stations I've seen have always been clearly marked and that I've never seen a regular outlet made intentionally available for charging cars. Thus, when this guy plugged his car into an unmarked regular outlet, it should have been fairly clear that this wasn't actually supposed to be available for such.

Concerned (irrationally so, but whatever) owners might simply buy a padlock for each accessible outdoor receptacle near the parking lot. Padlocks are very clear signals concerning the public availability of amenities. I have no complaint about involving police when padlocks are broken or otherwise bypassed, whereas I doubt police resources are well-spent in reacting to an incident the owner could have prevented by spending $10.

I completely agree about the wisdom of padlocking things you want to secure, and am undecided about the utility of calling police when you fail to, but these are completely orthogonal concerns to the question of a property owner's legal and moral rights, and his right to complain, in the event that they're the victims of theft for something they haven't secured.

Legally speaking, they technically need to. This is why the landowner is liable for damages to a trespasser unless a no trespassing sign is up.

Absolutely not. The question of liability is a completely different one. Just because you can be liable doesn't mean they have the right to be there.

If I leave a stack of $100 bills sitting in front of my door and you take them, that is theft and you can be prosecuted and I most certainly have the right to complain about it, even if I really should have kept it more securely.

In the US (IL specifically) I saw an article that said $2 per 85 miles (about 140km) driven. So let's say you're in the US and you really care about the cost of driving (one of the main reasons for you getting an electric car) you might compare to a gasoline car getting 30 - 40 mpg. At roughly $3.50 per gallon right now We could round up and say you're paying $8 to $9 to get that same 85 miles with a (by American standards) fuel efficient car. So if you're paying $40 - $50 to fill your car thats' about $10 in electricity. Of course if you've got a 6 cylinder with some regular traffic driving you're probably much closer to 20mpg so you're at $15 vs $2 above. Pretty meaningful. (yes I'm ignoring other costs involved including setting up your house to charge a car and the additional cost for an electric car up front vs its gasoline peer)

High single digit dollars.

I'll agree with that and add to it as well -- there's also the perception that powering up a whole car is an expensive endeavor. I can easily imagine that the cop who saw the guy plugged in probably saw dollars trickling from the wall, where a cell phone plugged in wouldn't seem as expensive.

I feel like petty theft incidents like this for first-time offenders should be handled more delicately -- e.g., he can pay back the amount stolen, and perhaps a $50 court cost, but while I agree that jail seems excessive for the crime, there was indeed a crime committed, and perhaps illustrating to the officers that it was only 5 cents worth of crime would lessen the severity.

What is the diference between a car and an iPhone? I could very well see a kid charging his iPhone at soccer practice to call mom for a ride home (or whatever). The issue is a commercial grade of service vs an residential or amateur one. The behaviour (say, recharging your laptop at starbucks) is not inherently larceny ("theft of property") in terms of social norms. Or are you suggesting it should be?

My wife will not plug in her iPhone to charge it at work. It all depends on your ethical standards. I, on the other hand, never thought twice about doing this.

EDIT: Didn't think I would have to actually explain this, but here goes: the phone is for her personal use, unlike the computer, monitor, and other things on her desk supplied, along with the electricity, by her employer.

If she is using a particularly bright monitor setting that might use more electricity per day than a plugged in phone.

Does she not think about work issues at home? Solve problems in her sleep? I doubt she's paid overtime for that.

Surely it's about give and take?

I personally find it quite odd that we've normalized the behavior of plugging electronics into random electrical outlets not explicitly labeled for public use. Not that I haven't done my fair share of the same over the years (especially in airports), but it's strange just the same.

In most parts of the US it costs less than a tenth of a cent to charge an iPhone. I think it would be extremely rare that any business or organization would choose saving the minuscule cost of electricity over allowing people who need a charge to take one, so in practice it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume it's okay in most situations.

I've always found it odd as well, so I was happy to see the terminals at a number of airports this summer all offering copious outlets for passengers to top-up devices.

Do you plug your in your iPhone without permission?

I've always thought that plugging in at random spots was theft, however small the scale, and applauded the coffee shop culture for offering WiFi and power as a cost of doing business, but without at least some form of permission, make no mistake, stealing power is no less theft than stealing cable, or gasoline, or whatever.

A $0.10 pencil is worth 200x the value of an full iphone charge[1,2].

[1] which has an economic value of ~ $0.0005 in the USA.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#Price_comp...

Does that invalidate that taking it is theft? How many of these non-thefts have to occur before the victim can claim damages?

Much financial theft is done on the order of fractions of cents, but those fractions of theft add up to real, tangible amounts. If I steal half a penny from a local shop owner, and the police don't/can't/won't stop me, then others might do the same. If 100 others do it, he's lost a nickel. If a thousand people do it, it's 5 bucks.

Where is the line before it becomes theft? Why is everybody allowed to take from this hypothetical shop owner and he has no recompense?

A good argument could be made you are stealing more economic value from every reader of HN who reads this comment filled with rhetorical questions. Should we call the police? Probably not, because that would be an ass-hat gesture of bad faith. Similarly, sending every customer a paper bill (that costs $2.00/per) for every incidental economic cost of 1/20th of a cent is not only bad social form, its just dumb economics. The game changes when you opportunistically take advantage of social graces. That I will not debate. The purpose is to do the math and to understand why some things are benevolent "social graces" and others are malevolent behaviours. Theoretical moral relativism (or equivalence) taken out of context is empty logic, tho.

Hacker News has tacitly given permission for the use of this website. In exchange, they get permission for rebroadcast, possibly copyright ownership, etc.

The point is that we're not "taking" from them, they're allowing us to do so. Having permission is the difference between theft and use of a good. Even if the resultant outcome is definitively good, it doesn't matter -- you cannot take without permission or it is a crime.

If a house is on fire, and that house is situated next to a fire extinguisher plant, the obvious good is to pilfer the extinguishers to douse the fire. That said, it is still theft, despite the beneficial outcome. If the extinguisher plant's owner wishes, he may press charges, demand recompense, or forgive the crime altogether, but whether or not he forgives the crime, it was indeed still a crime.

Also, it's worth noting, the school is not a commercial entity. Had he stolen his power from Starbucks, which routinely gives power away as a part of doing business, the school has no incentive to do so, nor compelling reason to practice less than 'dumb economics' because giving away power for them is, in fact, dumb economics.

I wonder if using outlet would be considered a fair use of the facilities. The car owner's son was playing tennis at the school which means he was given a permission to use the facility. If this is the case then using the parking lot, drinking fountain, water in the bathroom, light or electric outlet at the school should be considered a fair use unless there is something that indicates otherwise (like a no-parking sign)

I suppose that in nearly every other country in the world, the police would not come, but a staff of the school would simply tell the car owner to just unplug his car and not do it again.

But maybe people like that should be sent in front of a court to give judges some work because the don't have enough work yet. This would be great, steal 5 cents of power, go in front of a court, active the police and the judiciary system, create 1000's $ of invoices, increase the GDP of the country!

Absolutely agree that if there were no prior encounters with man who charged his car, then the cop acted in bad faith wasting tens of thousands of dollars of public money in judicial costs for a "crime" than could have been prevented with a simple community policing effort, basically telling the guy to unplug the car.

But of course considering that crappy newspapers like USAToday often omit information to make the stories sound bigger (technically not a lie), there may have been some background that caused the cop to arrest the car owner.

Also I wonder if using outlet would be considered a fair use of the facilities. The car owner son was playing tennis at the school which means he was given a permission to use the facility. If this is the case then using the parking lot, drinking fountain, light or electric outlet at the school should be considered a fair use.

Just stop with this nonsense.

There's likely more story here than what the article provides. Most likely he had been told before not to plug in, has an unrelated dispute with someone at the school, etc.

Not every story needs to be an excuse to rant against the system.

There just seems to be so many of these great little nuggets coming from across the pond. Offhand: "Don't tase me bro"

Nothing to see here! Move along!

>Not every story needs to be an excuse to rant against the system.

B...but what else will go on HN to do?

Hmmm. A couple of thoughts. One, it sounds like it's outside of school hours. (after school practise). So not sure how many school employees are left. And while I hear you on the strong response for a minor offense in general it's becoming clearer that the worst thing police can do is look the other way at minor infractions. The "one broken window" approach to policing.

Agreed. It was a Saturday. And it doesn't say anywhere that the police were called by a school employee. There very well may not have been any school employees on site at the time. Perhaps a neighbor called it in. Perhaps the cop just happened by. The full article that this one links to says he was not arrested on the spot. But days later after it was determined that the school had not given him permission. There is also not even any mention if his kid even went to that school. I know my kids have various sports practices/games at other schools that they do not attend.

Stop the silliness. There are a lot of electric outlets and costs add up quickly. If you turn a blind eye to energy theft, you can easily lose thousands of dollars a year. (Asumming casual thieves. Serious thieves running heating and cooling can burn through tens of thousands of dollars a year.) The police are right to nip the problem in the bud.

Let's look at the facts: 5 cents.

The Nissan LEAF gets 3.16 mi/kWh[1]. When plugged into a standard household outlet for 20 minutes you get 1.67 miles of driving (1 hour = 5 miles)[2], which by my calculation is 0.52848101 kWh of electricity. As the elementary school is in CHAMBLEE, Ga. the utility provider is Georgia Power[3]. The highest electricity rate for a school is 10.9269¢ per kWh. So a man got arrested in front of his kids and community for "stealing" $0.0577465918[4].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf#cite_note-CR1211-69

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf#cite_note-84

[3]http://www.georgiapower.com/pricing/files/rates-and-schedule...

[4]http://www.11alive.com/news/article/314666/40/Electric-car-o...

Sounds like there's gotta be more to the story. Any sane officer, school, jurisdiction, would have either ignored it or told the guy to knock it off and then left him alone. For there to be an actual arrest, probably either the cop is a raging dickhead (unlikely), the guy was a raging dickhead to the cop (rather more likely), or the guy was involved in some unrelated prior dispute that this is retaliation for. For criminal charges to be filed and not dismissed the first time a DA or judge sees it, it kinda implies either the unrelated dispute or the entire legal system in the area is full of raging dickheads all covering for each other.

...either the cop is a raging dickhead (unlikely)...

Is this a "privileged" statement?

It's Suburban Atlanta. Every cop is a raging dickhead with quotas on their mind.

Already covered on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844702

This sounds like a situation that was just blown out of partition. An officer who cares about the theft of five cents on a single occasion is an officer with too much free time. Does he realize how much his five minutes cost tax payers when he was telling this guy about how he stole? And seriously? Stole! Five cents of electricity from a public school? The guy's a tax payer (assumption), therefore, if you follow the money, somehow he paid for the electricity to begin with. If you take that aside even more, it's better for him to steal five cents of electricity than drive a gasoline car, I'd gladly allow random strangers to charge from my parking lot outlets if it encouraged more people to go green. Considering tax money also gives free electricity to people who cannot afford it, hypothetically, if this guy was on a financial assistance program to pay for his utilities would it still be stealing considering the money is coming from the same place? It's not like five cents would hold either, the moment this is disputed it'd be dropped.

1. The guy who stole the electricity would want someone to ask before they used his electricity. 2. I doubt the police officer would arrest anyone in his family for doing something this petty.

Principled thinking would have resolved the conflict before it started.

I agree that this person should not have been using the school's electricity to charge his car. But to have him arrested is an extreme over reaction. The punishment does not fit the crime. That is what I take away from this story.

Well to be a stickler for detail being arrested isn't the punishment. If he was taken to the police station then let off with a warning that would be his actual punishment. However I agree that it's a rather extreme response from the onsite officer.

Sgt. Ford says the officer should have arrested Kamooneh on the spot. But he didn't. Instead, the officer filed a police report. Then 11 days passed, and two deputies showed up at his house in Decatur. [snip] Ford said he sought the arrest warrant after determining that school officials hadn't given Kamooneh permission to plug in his car.

The onsite officer did exactly as he should. He filed a report. And then the officer's boss (Sgt. Ford) got the arrest warrant later. And then 2 other officers made the arrest. So there was more than just one person involved here.

> charged

Heh.

At least the car owner was not charged with battery.

Deleted comment

Go ahead. Mock us because we're plugged in to such a current story.

Reddit leaking?

I know that this person wasn't doing this, but would it be feasible to charge the car up at school, and then once at home use the car as a generator to save on his electricity bill?

The journalist needs to put a tiny little bit more effort into it....

The real story is likely something along the lines of the usual labor dispute, or this guy is dating an ex-girlfriend of someone in mgmt, or he filed a complaint and this is the anti-whistleblower reaction.

As a resident of a northern tier state this story from Georgia is weird because most people up here have block heaters and they will plug into any hole it'll fit into. The current draw of a block heater is wildly variable but then again they're wildly more popular. Pretty much, nobody blinks at this behavior as long as you don't do something idiotic/dangerous like run an extension cord across a road/walkway or thru a puddle of water. There's a reason they put those electrical outlets at the base of the lightpost and it's not to encourage stupid extension cord triplines.

Your tax dollars at work!

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