My Uber got pulled over by the Denver police – and then things got really weird | Hacker News Reader

My Uber got pulled over by the Denver police – and then things got really weird

geekwire.com

85 pointsarielm25 comments

The story would have been a lot shorter if the author knew not to answer police questions.

"The officer then opened the backseat door where I was sitting and asked if I was paying for the ride."

Just don't answer. You don't have to. Even if you knew the law had passed in Denver, why would you answer? It cannot help you.

Right. Piss off a cop. Brilliant! The balanced and calculated reactions of these individuals was very impressive, I only wish I had their fortitude and thoughtfulness in such situations.

never talk to cops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

The right way to handle a police stop (in the US): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDJrQBwJpqk

And the wrong way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_HUNQIAAR0

Starts at 1:10

There's no need to be an rude about it.

"Sorry, officer, I don't understand your question."

"Are you paying to be a passenger in this vehicle?"

"I'm sorry, officer, I want to help you, but I just don't understand how this involves me. I'm just a passenger here."

Most cops will just give up asking the question there. If the officer pushes the issue, he's being an asshole, but you can still very politely invoke your fifth amendment rights: "Sorry, officer, I should have an attorney present to help me with these questions."

At that point, answers to any further questions (if any: standard police policy everywhere is to cease questioning immediately) are completely inadmissable (Edwards v. Arizona, 1981).

You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride: that's true. With that said, the cops who will bring you downtown for asserting your rights are exactly the cops that you really shouldn't be talking to.

(IANAL, FWIW; I'm just an occasionally rude anti-authoritarian citizen who has to mentally practice polite assertion of my rights so I don't accidentally piss off cops who, in their view, are just doing their jobs.)

The correct way to politely decline a question is "I'm sorry officer, I can't discuss this without my attorney present."

You're not dodging the question, but offering a well-understood reason, and the reason involves something real but external to both yourself and the LEO.

I am in no way familiar with american law, however Miranda rights state that you have the right to remain silent, the Fifth amendment says you have the right not to self-incriminate.

They are asking questions in a leading way, its how they are trained. You just have to be diplomatic and nice about it.

I have been stopped before and asked how fast I was driving. I simply said I was not sure but I thought it was at the speed limit. Unless the police have evidence they can only have a talk with you.

I don't know it's that simple. There's dealing with the law and then there's dealing with people. Which of those you give more weight to depends on circumstances such as risk vs. reward.

The police are people, subject to the same quirks that everyone else is. Just as with any organization, the culture also has a part to play (hopefully you aren't in an area with heavy police corruption.)

If you are riding as a passenger and you don't otherwise have anything to worry about, then there is probably more risk to going against the police than by simply cooperating even if you don't have to. If you have something to hide and you are the driver, then you want to be pulling every trick you can.

Unless being an Uber driver is a criminal offense, then I assume they could only write you a ticket that you could then take to the courts. If the police aren't up to date with recent changes to the laws, the the courts should be.

Just be a nice person, even if you are encountering someone in a position of authority who is having a bad day.

Like I said in reply to another comment[0], asserting your rights doesn't have to be rude. There are polite ways to assert your rights. The critical point in that comment, though, is that the kind of cop that's going to be angered by your assertion of your rights is exactly the kind of cop you shouldn't be talking to anyway.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8059772

In reality there is more risk with simply cooperating, with no risk for exercising your rights. In both cases they could arrest you, but in the first case they may now have evidence they can use against you.

Simply inform the officer you cannot answer any questions. You can be a nice person and still exercise your rights.

This brings up an interesting point about what exactly the law is and how everyone's supposed to be aware of it.

It's 2014. Why can't officers carry a tablet that stores the entirety of the law, and show you exactly to the letter which law you're violating? Likewise, every citizen should have trivial access to the extant laws, with notes explaining them in a way that's comprehensible to anyone with a high school education.

If ignorance of the law isn't a valid excuse for breaking it, everyone should have simple access to it.

This is really a brilliant idea, thanks.

The law isn't just what's on the statute book, it has to be read in the context of case law (at least in jurisdictions that use a common law system), which evolves over time and can vary based on the individual facts of the case.

That said, things like that do exist - the UK's entire statute book (well, almost) is available online,[0] free of charge and via a RESFTful API in machine-readable formats.[1]

Likewise, the German federal government publishes the law in XML, and there's even a markdown representation available on github.[2]

[0] http://legisltion.gov.uk/

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats

[2] https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

It appears that this HN post links to itself instead of the article (as of 11:12pm ET). What's going on here?

Perhaps a server bug, or a mod mistake..?

The submitter didn't include a url. We'll add it. But this is not a good HN story: high controversy, low information.

It also just dropped from 2nd or 3rd position to 31st, pushing it off the front page, in a matter of minutes with little or no change to the ranking of anything else.

Sure; users are flagging it and we just penalized it. The story is not a good fit for HN, as anyone who has read the HN guidelines should know. It is deplorable that a police officer handled an Uber situation inappropriately, and stories with a high indignation-to-information ratio are not appropriate here.

I didn't submit this story because of the way the police office handled this person but rather because I (and most likely a good number of other readers) take uber x and should know that this could happen to them as well.

I was talking about the "legality" of uber x with a friend yesterday and figured other reader may have a similar question.

I'm pretty sure the URL disappeared after I updated the title. Thanks for correcting it.

Link should probably be http://www.geekwire.com/2014/hey-denver-police-harrass-ridin...

A confused police officer made a bad call. Do we have to up vote every single article about Uber?

Good thing he didn't admit he was wrong. That would have shifted the entire balance of power in the nation, and anarchy would have ensued.

Edit: gonna leave my initial snark for context, but this isn't about Uber to me. It's further information about how completely out of bounds the power structure is in the US, and how accountability for police action is continuously declining.

"Uber" gives the article some sex appeal, admittedly, but I prefer to have articles about abuses of power up-voted. The more you know, and whatnot.

Apologies for the snark, but I'd rather read this article than not. You give the officer an out - he was "confused" and whatnot - but when you hold power over the general population, "bad calls" aren't as easily forgivable, because they cause real world harm - and every time they aren't held to account, police feel a bit more invincible.

No it's about the accelerating evolution of technology and disruption and the social chaos it's generating. Not saying it's bad, just that this is all happening.

As much as I cringe a little when I use the word, Uber is disruptive to an industry, and the spirit of what we're all doing here is to find ways of disrupting industries. This reminds us of that. Plus, it was an interesting, well written story.

When you get to the end of the article, the police officer is presented as being extremely creepy.

From the article:

After the officer gave the citation, he opened the back door again and offered me a “free” ride to the airport. I told him that I had learned while he was gone that the state had just enacted a law allowing Uber. In fact, I referenced that the Governor was proud of it.

I then asked point blank if what I was doing was illegal. The officer didn’t answer my question, said there was some sort of disagreement being discussed about the law and then he told me that the driver had no commercial insurance and that if he got in a wreck and I got injured that there would be no insurance.

He asked again: Do you want the “free” ride or not? I asked him one more time if what I was doing was illegal. He said he didn’t want to debate the law.

Again, he asked: Do you want the ride or not?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com