In my experience, Hertz has abysmal customer service. Getting a reasonable person (or in certain cases a person at all) on the phone is near impossible.
Last time I tried to cancel a reservation on the phone with them, it took almost an hour to convince the customer support that my reservation existed. During the course of this hour, they insisted several times that the reservation didn't exist. After about 20 minutes of this, I asked to speak to a manager and was flat out denied. Since their policy does not allow hanging up on a customer service call, I refused to get off the line until I was escalated to a manager, so over the next 30 minutes the support person called me several names, including "liar", "cheat", and told me to get off the phone and find something better to do.
Finally, I was escalated to the manager who managed to find my reservation and cancel it for me. Imagine my surprise a week later when I found out that my reservation had in fact not been cancelled and I had been charged hundreds of dollars regardless.
At this point I was fed up with their customer phone service, and resorted to emails instead. The same scenario played out again, and it took dozens of emails, credit card receipts, and 4 weeks of my time for them to finally refund me my money.
The whole experience was rather eye opening in an awful and surreal sort of way.
This would have been an ideal situation for you to request your cc company issue a charge back fwiw.
Edit:
Learned about charge backs here on HN, I've contacted a cc company twice to request one and in both cases the charging company promptly reached out and resolved the dispute w/o actually needing to follow through.
You’d be surprised. Most people formulate their love for chargebacks via interactions with small sketchy merchants who are unresponsive or obstinate. In those cases the CC companies are always on your side.
That rule doesn’t apply to giant sophisticated companies that process a lot of transactions and have detailed rules, lengthy contracts or fare fules and so on like airlines or car rental companies. The CC companies are going to give them the benefit of the doubt in a different way.
My experience agrees. I had a bad rental from Hertz, and American Express rejected my chargeback three times.
The evidence Hertz provided was literally a letter that just said they provided services for 5 days, even though they provided me with a detective vehicle and charged me for 10 days.
I understand the point of contention on how much I should pay for a broken car, but I don't understand why American Express can't check that the time period is wrong. In the end, Hertz at least refunded the overcharged number of days because it was so easy to convince anyone paying attention that it was wrong ...
I noticed as much, one was with Dish Networks and I made sure to cite specific relevant contract clauses, provided documentation like "on date A at time B I spoke with rep C who provided employee id number D and said E providing confirmation number F...", then the Dish rep still tried to barter down the charges until I stated "I do not think we can reach a resolution and plan to deal with the cc company directly to proceed" for a reversal to be processed. This was ~$500, I'm sure it gets much worse.
> In my experience, Hertz has abysmal customer service. Getting a reasonable person (or in certain cases a person at all) on the phone is near impossible.
They absolutely do. I had to rent a car, last minute (like very very last minute), and went to Hertz (I usually use Enterprise). I booked online and Uber'ed to the rental place. They had billed my (business) card for a prepaid rental...
... and then wouldn't rent the car because I "failed" their ID / etc verification, "most likely because my ID profile wasn't tied to my card" (it's a business card, this doesn't seem like anything uncommon).
And then wanted to refuse my refund because it was prepaid.
So I ask for a car, pay for it, go to get it, you won't give it to me, and then you won't give my money back to me?
This is actually very common with all rental companies. They consider "failure to pass id/credit checks" is somehow the customers fault, and therefore the customer should pay up, just as if they hadn't showed up for a reservation.
That sounds pretty ridiculous, thank you for sharing the info about not hanging up on customers. I hope to never need it, but part of me worries that with enough bad luck, any customer support call can turn into this.
Similar experience with Sixt here, I'll never use them again and I use every opportunity available to steer potential customers away from them. Avoid Sixt like the plague.
>Finally, I was escalated to the manager who managed to find my reservation and cancel it for me. Imagine my surprise a week later when I found out that my reservation had in fact not been cancelled and I had been charged hundreds of dollars regardless.
What if that manager wasn't actually a manager, but just a colleague of the first person? That person told you you that he found and cancelled your reservation just for you to get off the line.
She was able to repeat back details of the reservation that I had not given them, so she had definitely found the reservation. This made the discovery of charges to my card even more frustrating later on.
It took my assistant two weeks of daily phone calls to the Hertz management at Boston Logan to get them to refund me $250 for an erroneous charge for lost keys.
I've actually had fairly good experiences calling Heartz on the phone. Did you pay for the reservation ahead of time? If you didn't, then there's no need to cancel it. If you don't pick up the car your credit card doesn't get charged (at least with Hertz). I usually call and tell them I'm canceling the reservation out of courtesy, but even if you forget, if you don't pick up your car, the reservation is invalidated. I also once showed up 4 or 5 hours late at Hertz, and they told me they'd cancelled my reservation since I didn't show up. I think they said they only hold it for an hour from the reservation time. I believe Hertz also lets you cancel your reservation online if it's more than 24 hours in the future. So you'd only need to call if it's <24 hours in the future.
Oh, it's a computer bug, see, no biggie, we all get those, right? Those darn computers, they sure are a handful.
I can't accept that. What happened here is that Hertz, as a rational and responsible entity, reported lawfully rented cars as being stolen, knowingly putting inocent customers in grave danger. It was not a computer that did it, there was a rational decision to let this critical task run without human supervision on a dodgy system with insuficient quality control.
What's next, Autocad glitch destroys sky scrapper? Windows Update sends passenger jet to fiery death? As soon as you take the rational decision to let life critical tasks run on software, you are vouching for the correctness of that software and it's appropriateness for the task and you are responsible if the software fails.
This is precisely why I will never ever let a car auto pilot me and my family. If I am going to die, it better be because of my negligence and not because someone "oopsies" code.
Those 1/10th figures are in city areas. I'd like to see autopilot work out where I live in rural areas where deer, hogs, and other critters on the road are present and lines marking lanes are either faded or non existent.
Genuinely I would love to see it work. I think it is cool, but I won't use it. I like driving and I like being in control of my destiny. Even if the risk is higher. That's what makes us human.
Dealing with deer, hogs, cows, etc...is a much easier problem than obstructions in an urban area. Heck, even the roads are easier to deal with since where those lines are faded are only two lane anyways.
But self driving cars aren’t even aimed at rural areas anyways. Rural areas simply don’t have the traffic or parking problems that make self driving cars incredibly desirable in urban areas.
I've grown up in rural areas, and I think that at some point, automated driving can be even better in those scenarios than humans can be.
I have not seen any evidence of us being at that point today. Of course, the focus of these companies right now is on intra-urban transit, for reasons that make almost make sense from a revenue perspective.
The one thing I want to see autopilot / assisted driving on is 18 wheelers. I've seen too many people get hit by trucks after crossing the median because the driver fell asleep.
One interesting point here is that the commonly-repeated mantra of "don't talk to police" would have likely resulted in this guy getting booked to jail, ending up with a mugshot on a couple of mugshot extortion websites, and generally getting his life upended.
That's some yuppie shit, got to be honest. Brown bearded guy reaches for his phone after telling the cop he's not going to talk and he's going to dial his lawyer and you get a guy without his beard, or his jaw, or his life.
For the people downvoting this post, consider that people have been shot in the US for complying with police orders, including literally lying on the ground with arms up [1], for simply possessing a firearm with hands well away from it [2], and for attempting to comply with police orders to crawl across the floor with legs crossed and arms up (yes, really) [3]. Getting immediately shot for putting a hand in a pocket is an entirely realistic possibility.
I don't think that's the right time to call your lawyer.
The advice I've received in the past is to comply to the best of your ability, don't talk to the police, call your lawyer when you have a chance, and fight whatever there is to fight in court or in the media.
Reaching for something in your pocket instead of complying will probably get you hurt regardless of race.
The "don't talk to police" mantra is for when you know that you've done something wrong. So the main thing is that you don't want to lie about it, because they're trained to detect lies, and to manipulate you into contradicting yourself.
Otherwise, being polite and not escalating is the safest approach. Because another aspect of traditional police training in the US is always out-escalating suspects.
Edit: What can I say? It clearly worked for this guy. Perhaps because he looks pretty harmless. But it's also worked for me. Because I also look pretty harmless, I guess.
That's assuming the police actually intend to arrest you. When questioned by police, you cannot talk yourself out of an arrest. If they already have evidence, they just want a confession to give the prosecutor a slam dunk case, but if they do not have evidence, saying you won't speak without a lawyer present will usually cause them to move on to the next person on their list, and you won't spend a dime on counsel or time in jail.
A lawyer helps ensure the innocent don't get screwed by a mistaken witness, a vindictive prosecutor, or a corrupt cop, and that the guilty don't get railroaded with a laundry list of bullshit charges. Money spent on a lawyer will generally pay dividends when you consider the cost of false convictions and false arrest - losing your job, bills going unpaid while you're behind bars (and the interest, penalties, evictions, and reposessions resulting from them), damage to your credit, trying to find a new apartment with an eviction on your record, having to get a new car, etc. All these factors combine to make people who go to jail far worse off when they get out, regardless of their guilt.
Cool. You just went to “imright.com” and found a guy to back up your claim. Now try finding the opposite that and see how many results you come up with.
I really should know better. I typically argue "don't talk to cops" when stuff like this comes up. And if I were SWATed right now, I'd hit the UPS panic button, and politely request a call to my lawyer. Because there's really nothing for me to say that would help me.
But if I get pulled over for some traffic offense, or even because some glitch has flagged my vehicle, I'm going to politely cooperate. While remaining noncommittal, of course. That's what FindLaw recommends.[0]
However:[1]
> Remain silent if arrested. If your traffic stop turns into an arrest, do not say anything to the police other than requesting an attorney. The police may try to get to volunteer information but refuse to say anything.[10]
So, I say, don't talk to the cops. Ask to speak with an attorney, and get competent advice before you answer the cops' questions. Are there mundane situations in which you might rationally decide to talk to the cops — say, if a neighbor's house is burglarized, and they come to ask if you saw anything? Sure. But you should view each interaction with the cops with an extreme caution bordering on paranoia, as you would handle a dangerous wild animal. When you talk to a cop, you are talking to someone who is often privileged to kill you with complete impunity, someone whose claims about what you said during your interaction — however fantastical — will likely be accepted uncritically by the system even if the particular cop is a proven serial liar. Even the most mundane interaction carries the potential for life-altering disaster.
If the cop shoots you, it won't matter what you said or didn't say.
And in TFA:
> According to ABC Action News, these affected customers ended up in handcuffs and in the back of a police car in the majority of the cases. A few people were even met with the business ends of a firearm and were taken into custody forcefully after disagreeing with police.
So with routine traffic stops, playing it cool is almost always the best bet. I've experienced scores of them, mostly for speeding, but some for reckless driving. And a couple for evading. And I've never gotten more than tickets.
One of those evading stops involved a county-wide APB :) I just said something like "Hey, I just saw "Dawn of the Dead", and got scared". Which was almost the truth, in that it was hypomania. They almost impounded the car, but eventually we all decided that it was funny.
> So with routine traffic stops, playing it cool is almost always the best bet. I've experienced scores of them
Why do American police stop people so often? Every American here seems to have experience of being stopped and acts like it’s a super normal thing. I live in the UK and I’m don’t think I’ve ever even spoken to an on-duty police officer in my life. They don’t just cruise around stopping cars here.
Multiple reasons, but the big one is money. There are a lot of places smaller than big cities who have massive revenue problems. Turning cops into revenue generators seems to be the preferred solution.
And then come second-order effects: private probation enforcement companies, private prisons, communications monopolies for private prisons... and they all lobby to keep and expand their pound of flesh. And you get this:
We haven't gone as far down the 1984 path as you have so we have still have human cops write tickets instead of using speed cameras.
It also depends a lot on your area. Where I live the cops to "real problems" ratio is pretty good. I'm basically free to go a safe and reasonable speed regardless of the speed limit. I'd have to do something really flagrant to get pulled over for it. In the wealthier cities and suburbs that the people of HN tend to live in you have many more bored cops looking for trouble where there is little to be found so they spend more time extracting revenue from motorists and making fishing stops.
But I hear about the police stopping people for things like tail lights in the US? Or in other comments people are talking about being stopped because they're driving a suspiciously cheap car in an expensive area? The police just don't seem to stop people here in the UK unless there's something seriously wrong. As I said elsewhere, I've never seen a tail light out ever, but it seems to be a common thing for normal people to be stopped for in the US?
And of course speed cameras don't bother you if you don't speed in the first place, so they don't catch people unless they're doing something wrong.
> they're driving a suspiciously cheap car in an expensive area?
This happens all the time in rich areas. It's a plain and simple fishing stop.
>I've never seen a tail light out ever,
Because your government intentionally makes vehicle ownership so financially onerous that everyone who drives a car has the resources (time more than money) to get it fixed promptly. In the US, even in poorer areas it's not common but it's not uncommon. In a 40min rush hour commute in the winter (when it's dark and you can see everyone using lights) I could probably still count on one hand the number of head lights and tail lights I see out.
You can't make a good first impression on a speed camera.
Overwhelming majority of fishing stops result in a warning because the cop realizes after getting a closer look at the vehicle and its occupants and realizing that there's nothing sketchy going on. And I say this as someone who's been subject to a heck of a lot of fishing stops because I tend to check the boxes that make me worth stopping (one time I had almost an entire PD stop me over the course of a month as they rotated through the shift and location that put them where I was driving at the time I was there).
I'd much rather have laws that go fishing than robots that enforce the law to the letter 100% of the time.
> result in a warning because the cop realizes after getting a closer look at the vehicle and its occupants and realizing that there's nothing sketchy going on
If there's nothing sketchy going on... what are they getting a warning for?
> You can't make a good first impression on a speed camera... I'd much rather have laws that go fishing than robots that enforce the law to the letter 100% of the time.
I don't want people being let off because they make a good impression! That lets the police enforce laws based on their biases, such as race or gender. I'd much rather have simple factual enforcement. Either you were speeding or not.
As far as internet comments go I think it's more than a stretch to put "screw off" in the abusive bucket.
>what are they getting a warning for?
So the cop can have a paper trail proving he was awake and working.
>I don't want people being let off because they make a good impression! That lets the police enforce laws based on their biases, such as race or gender. I'd much rather have simple factual enforcement. Either you were speeding or not.
Automated enforcement of the letter of the law would instantly screw basically everyone. I don't think you understand how many letter of the law violations cops see every day and choose not to do anything about.
So me getting warnings, and my plates being in a cop's notebook / files is, to you, an acceptable price to pay for law enforcement officer productivity accountability?
>As far as internet comments go I think it's more than a stretch to put "screw off" in the abusive bucket.
But not "as far as HN comments go". The community members, posting rules/guidelines, the user moderation system, dang, etc. work to foster friendly substantive discussions. Please help this effort.
I think you're basically making a slippery slope argument. Nobody was arguing for automatic enforcement of all laws, but I think traffic laws are fine. I've never had a traffic ticket for anything ever. If you don't speed, they don't bother you.
If you're the type to drive no more than 55.00 mph on the highways posted at 55 and with prevailing speeds of 70-75 mph, you're probably doing more harm to society than help, to be honest.
> I'd much rather have laws that go fishing than robots that enforce the law to the letter 100% of the time.
This is how corruption, and racial profiling, and all manner of terrible things start.
You definitely DO want the laws enforced 100% without exception. It must be applied to those who write the law as equally as it does to everybody else. This is how laws get fixed.
>Why do American police stop people so often? Every American here seems to have experience of being stopped and acts like it’s a super normal thing.
And they also seem to think a cop pointing a gun at people they've stopped, or even shooting them for reaching into their pockets is also normal ("what did they expect?").
>I live in the UK and I’m don’t think I’ve ever even spoken to an on-duty police officer in my life. They don’t just cruise around stopping cars here.
What I really want to know is what's wrong with American break-lights? Often the cause for a stop seems to be 'your break-light was out' (sometimes it's implied it's a lie, other times not.) Again I've never seen a break-light out in the UK, never been stopped for a break-light, never had to replace my break-lights. What's different?
(from movies) I think it's usually the 'tail light' and it's so they can smash it when the walk by. I've never heard of a break light being out either.
> I've never heard of a break light being out either.
LED lights are slowly reducing this, but I don't think I can do my 20 minute morning commute for a week without seeing at least one car with a burned out brake light. How is it possible that you've never seen or heard of it?
Are you certain that movies reflect reality in this regard? I'm less willing than you are to believe a cop would smash a tail light, perhaps you could link me to a recent incident or something.
I don't even understand how you could easily smash a tail light. They're inside the car bodies, encased in heavy plastic, and usually made of LEDs so there's no single bulb to hit even if you could get through the plastic.
> They're inside the car bodies, encased in heavy plastic, and usually made of LEDs so there's no single bulb to hit even if you could get through the plastic.
Cops intentionally breaking tail lights is 99.999% something from Hollywood. I try and keep up to date on the various stupid abuses of power that happen at police departments throughout the country and I've never even heard of it happening. I thinks the notion of cops breaking tail lights probably predates the war on drugs (which gave them other ways to manufacture probably cause)
Nevertheless, tail lights weren't commonly LEDs until fairly recently and the styling that results in deeper housings also wasn't default until the mid 2000s. You can definitively break a tail light with the back end of a flashlight relatively easily though.
I'm sure you can imagine some jerk cop breaking a tail light on some 90s car because the person gave him lip and he can't find anything else to write a ticket for but jerk cops do all sorts of things and it's not really appropriate to use edge cases to reason about normal cases.
From what I've read, police in the UK rely more on speed cameras. But there certainly are lots of police in the US. I live in a small city, and it's rare that I don't see at least one police vehicle on a trip to the supermarket or whatever.
I experienced so many because I'm bipolar, and was taking an SSRI, which made me hypomanic, but with little affect.
There are substantial protections against unlawful search and seizure in the US constitution which are also supported by subsequent legal precedent/case law, often specifically referencing private property, dwellings, persons, etc. An arrest warrent does not necessarily allow police to go barging in to private dwellings to enforce it. Persons in vehicles were generally not explicitly referenced in the law and a slow encroachmemt on executive power has led to 100+ years of case law that eroded those protections when it comes to persons in vehicles, especially on public roadways. This has led to vehicles in public being a place where police have a lot of legal leeway and a common place for police to enforce warrants, etc. for minor violations and a common place for police to fish for possible crimes with less risk of explicitly violating a persons rights (at least in the eyes of the judiciary).
As I understand it, US culture makes it impossible for the state to build a trustable database of inhabitants, complete with addresses etc.
So if a cop sees something, he has to react immediately. They cant simply go to your home afterwards as they dont always know where it is. And gun culture makes it impossible to know when some random dude is going to shoot you, especially when pissed off or drunk. So I can understand the cop paranoia.
Strange thing with social security numbers as pseudo-id happen there too. I wonder how they know who to tax over there.
See small towns like Hampton, FL that get their funding overwhelmingly from setting up bullshit speed traps and ticketing everyone who passes through, sometimes to the point of the town existing almost entirely as a support structure for the police department: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton,_Florida
>The "don't talk to police" mantra is for when you know that you've done something wrong.
Or when you're dealing with police who are just looking for an excuse to arrest someone. The problem being, you don't know when you're dealing with one of those people.
> The "don't talk to police" mantra is for when you know that you've done something wrong.
No, though there is a it of a balancing act. It certainly isn't “never report a crime” or “never call 911 when a person is distress and cooperate with first responders when they arrive, even if those first responders happen to be police”. But it's a lot more than “never talk to the police when you know you are guilty”.
> So the main thing is that you don't want to lie about it, because they're trained to detect lies, and to manipulate you into contradicting yourself.
They are trained to manipulate you into contradicting yourself and will use that training if they don't like you, or if they suspect you are lying (and police aren't magical lie detectors, they are wrong a lot about their suspicions, in both directions), or for any number of other reasons, and lying to them is often a crime itself.
But about TFA, it's true that stealing vehicles typically results in arrest. And it's true that making substantive statements to police, without your lawyer present, is dangerous.
However, when you have in fact rented, and not stolen, the vehicle, it's fine to say that. And it's fine to say that you have the rental agreement in the vehicle. That should be enough to defuse the situation. Even if it takes a while, and even if you end up handcuffed.
Going immediately to "I want my attorney" is silly in those circumstances. If you've lost the rental agreement, or if you screwed up and didn't return the vehicle on time, then "I want my attorney" is the prudent course. But otherwise, it pretty much guarantees that you'll be arrested. And having been arrested can be problematic when seeking employment.
> I think the sort of cerebral effect of feeling incarcerated made me extra lucid.
I mean, he was handcuffed for awhile by the side of the road over a clerical error. That genuinely sucks. But if he ever does find himself actually incarcerated I bet he’ll learn the difference.
I learned the difference in 2011 when I was nearly killed by the LAPD. It's not a one-upping game but man, some people don't realize the kind of actual evil and malice and terror that their fellow humans endure daily... Being handcuffed is a pittance compared to the possible nightmare scenarios..
I've only had three interactions with the police in my very old life and I have come very close to dying each time. Not sure if I just ran into three people on extremely bad days but I can't emphasize enough how lucky you are if you have never had to interact with United States law enforcement. You don't know what you're missing, and that's a good thing. Keep missing it.
The idea of an algorithmic bug leading to false arrests is not exactly the worst case scenario I can imagine, but it's really close to the worst case scenario I can imagine.
Seems like all he had to do was to show the receipt, the cops called the rental place, cleared the stolen car alert. The car rental should probably be charged for falsify reporting the car as stolen. And as the police said, you could probably ask for a year of free rental for the inconvenience.
The police has to take some precaution because they risk their lives walking up to a stolen car, thus the not so friendly tone and hand-cups.
There would be no story to tell had the cops been able to just call Hertz in a reasonable time. Instead apparently it took ages to go through the meanders of phone support.
This happened to me! I flew to jacksonville FL, and they gave me a car. upon return they were all freaking out because the car was reported stolen. I was like wtf, here’s the keys, and got to my plane. I would have been pissed if I was arrested.
This happened to me too. I rented a Hertz vehicle while on a trip to San Diego in 2005. I had to exchange the car at their airport location due to a flat tire. Two days later while driving from Coronado to Imperial Beach, I was stopped. About four additional officers showed up and had me exit the vehicle at gun point and lay flat on the road, and that's when I was informed the car had been reported stolen. Thankfully I wasn't arrested either, but spent about an hour with the Coronado police on the side of the road getting this mess resolved. I avoid renting whenever possible to this day.
I drove a Hertz vehicle in Germany. Two weeks later, back home, I got a letter from a German town/municipality with a speeding fine. Included is a photo from the camera... the person in the photo is not me, and the timestamp is days after my rental finished.
Thankfully, they resolved it with a couple of (very confused) phone calls. Sounds like I got lucky.
Had something very similar: Rented an Europcar van in Copenhagen, I got a parking ticket for the night before I rented the car in front of the Europcar office.
I answered them and tried to explain it, they haven't contacted me since then, but they didn't even bother to apologize. Seems to be pretty common these days...
I rented one in Italy. Two weeks later hertz charged me an admin fee for passing my details to the police - apparently we'd been flashed by a speed camera, no idea where.
Police never got in touch though, which makes me wonder if it was all a ruse. I'm not exactly going to chase up the police to find out.
I don’t know how long ago this was, but Italy is notorious for taking a long time to deliver tickets (like, a year because that’s how long they are allowed to take). If it’s a small fine they might just decide that it’s not worth it.
You should though, if you ever plan on visiting Europe again, before an EU-wide notice is put out for you and you get arrested at the airport until you pay the fine and costs...
It doesn’t work this way in EU, no one’s going to arrest you at the airport for unpaid speeding ticket. All you will get is nuisance from debt collectors and possible additional penalties.l, that’s it.
Afaik, German authorities would have to issue a warrant to Europol to actually have you arrested in another EU country. (And I don't see them actually looking for you for a mere parking ticket...)
What EU countries start to do is sharing the license plates files between countries.
I got a (non registered) letter in the mail 3 years ago from the federal police force in Belgium with no easy way to pay the fine (related to a speeding offense which I recognise I most likely did commit). Got them on the phone once but it came to nothing. (If a belgian cop reads this: I'm more than willing to pay :) ).
Interestingly, at the time, belgian plates caught speeding in France were not contacted so the agreement or its technical implementation were not reciprocal.
I also received a parking fine from Brussels city, which made payment simple & efficient via a SEPA transfer.
Europe is far less integrated than US HN users seem to think. Countries are sovereign, they simply choose to collaborate on parts of their legal framework, parts which can be different on a country by country basis.
For instance, Schengen (freedom of movement for visa holders of a member country, generally no border controls between them) is 22 EU countries PLUS Switzerland, Norway & others. Members still have the ability to reinstate full border controls if need be (was the case during the terrorist attacks in France & Belgium in 2015/2016).
License plates schemes and vehicles insurances (ironically, insurance certificate are called "green cards"...) are valid amongst the Council of Europe members (basically all of geographical Europe, Russia & Turkey included)
> What EU countries start to do is sharing the license plates files between countries.
Just wanted to add that this license plate integration is going at full speed. My brother is a truck driver who carries stuff to Western Europe once every 2-3 weeks or so (we live in Romania). About a month ago he received a speeding ticket from the French authorities, translated in Romanian and with a photo of his face as he was driving the truck.
The interesting thing was that the fine was sent to his home/personal address, even though the truck is owned by my brother's employer, not by my brother directly. So on top of making the license plate/owner connection, it seems that for stuff like trucks some traffic authorities also have information about the private details of the drivers operating those trucks.
I live in Europe. If Hertz's charge was genuine, then the police had valid contact details for me for at least a year, and didn't get in touch - I can't see that being my responsibility.
Travelling abroad for the first time, Hertz got me a GPS that didn't work (no, smart phones were almost non-existent back then and portable GPS was shinning new in cars).
When I finally found a Hertz store in another city, they had a long time to replace it because the rental wasn't found in the system and, for Hertz, it was not possible that I was with their car.
Yeah, that can happen; I'm afraid a lot of the processes at car rental firms are still manual labor.
Always keep the documents around for at least a year after renting a car; those are your evidence, and they can match them up with their internal records. (And they'll be the primary counter-evidence if they messed up said internal records)
The absolute impunity with which large corporations operate never ceases to amaze me.
Let say that I, as an individual, report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone, and then I do it again, and again, and dozens more times, resulting in false arrests and jail time for law-abiding citizens.
I’m pretty sure this couldn’t happen. I’d end up in jail myself for filing false police reports before I got anywhere close to double digits. But when it’s a giant company, they make a statement about how it’s extremely rare and continue on with business as usual.
It’s often said that “corporations are people,” legally speaking. This is clearly wrong. Corporations occupy a much more privileged position than people in the legal world!
The asymmetry with the criminal penalties individuals face versus the civil penalties private organizations face feels like a rejection of the idea of the rule of law.
The worst part, for me at least, is I'm not even sure how you would sue Hertz for something like this. It's negligence resulting in false imprisonment, but not all false imprisonment tort statutes have negligence as a valid cause of action. There's also malicious prosecution and defamation, but that typically also requires intent, rather than just negligence or recklessness. I suppose that it could fall under the blanket "unfair business practices" tort, but the damages would probably be limited. In PA for example, you couldn't get more than $1,000 out of that claim.
This is an absurd set of factual circumstances, and there are almost no accountability structures in place to fight it. It's incredibly disheartening.
> I’m pretty sure this couldn’t happen. I’d end up in jail myself for filing false police reports before I got anywhere close to double digits.
To your point, just this week Chicago Alderman Proco "Joe" Moreno was charged with "disorderly conduct, obstruction of justice and insurance fraud" for saying a woman stole his car after he lent it to her.
Not to disagree with your assertion that corporations get away with a lot of things they shouldn’t but in this case, a corporation is many many people. Hertz isn’t the equivalent of just one person, it would be insane to treat them as such since they rent out hundreds or thousands of cars a day.
Plus I’m not even sure what you’re suggesting here...that we put the entire company on trial or in jail? Operate like that and you’ll quickly find the boundaries of innovation receding.
Scale isn’t an excuse. If I personally rented out hundred of thousands of cars a day, the judge isn’t going to tell me, “Well, don’t worry about those dozens of false police reports, nobody’s perfect.”
Ok, they’re many many people. Are the individuals who made these false reports being held responsible, then?
That’s the problem: if you try to hold the corporation accountable, people say that it’s made up of many individuals and most of them had nothing to do with the crime. If you try to hold the individuals accountable, people say that they were acting on behalf of the corporation and it’s not right to punish them alone.
I don’t know what the solution is, but allowing large companies to get away with crimes that would ruin my life if I committed them myself is not the way to go.
Holding C-level executives responsible for the companies they're supposed to be responsible for, for starters. That's their whole job. They get paid enough for it.
Secondarily, regulation of software quality when it can cause problems this big.
Let's try to apply that to the case in this article. There are two speculated causes:
* some bug in the backoffice systems that causes cars not to be flagged as rented;
* failure of first-line employees to properly enter cars as rented.
It seems plausible that neither potential cause has a single decision or a single decision-maker who could plausibly have known that this was a likely outcome of some decision or decisions.
After a lot of investigation, it might be that we can reasonably lay the bug at the feet of someone who (e.g.,) decided to ship at time T instead of waiting for more QA and acceptance testing. This has been going on for some time, apparently. Is "Go to jail in 2020 for false imprisonment" an outcome that makes sense for a product owner on a library that was built in 2005, or a college student that put out a quick lib on github in 2012 to solve a problem encountered on her own website? Of course, there's a whole chain of decision makers in between: the Hertz coder that used the library, the manager signoff and/or legal signoff for using the library, the decision to ship without 100% use case coverage, and many, many more.
When people talk about "people who make the decisions", though, they typically mean executives. It's not clear to me that any executive's decision necessarily led to this. If everyone implementing those decisions were perfectly competent and always did the right thing, then nothing would have gone wrong. Since they never are, it was quite possible that something would go wrong, but "imprison dozens of people" was probably not a reasonable anticipation for screwing this up.
If we look at the other speculated cause, there is superficially more responsibility: whoever put off entering the rental changes "caused" the arrests in a slightly more direct way. There might be a number of factors found in the analysis, such as
* poor task design, so that papers could be lost or so that cars could be driven away without the computer being updated;
* overwork, leading to customer-facing personnel believing that they do not have time "right now" to enter rental changes
Behind those people, though, it's possible there's no decision which clearly caused this. If there's no way to anticipate some terrible outcome, and if our legal system decides to punish "decision makers", then being an executive in any business is gambling with your freedom.
I have a different solution: legal consequences for people who take actions, and allowing trade in those like any other liability, such that an employment contract could specify which kinds of consequences for which the employer does and does not accept employees' liability. There may be a detail or two still to work out... ;)
I think we should take the opposite approach for executives. Rather than say they probably didn’t make any decision that specifically led to a given outcome, let’s assume that they are responsible for any given outcome within their organization unless proven otherwise.
Isn’t that the whole point of leadership? You’re in control, and in exchange you’re also responsible.
I don’t think this means being an executive in any business would be gambling with your freedom. Businesses could be set up to have better processes and better control. One of the reasons that many businesses are set up so that huge problems can happen without any explicit decision from an executive is because this means nobody is held responsible. The entire system is set up so that you can get away with absolutely heinous shit as long as the chain of responsibility is unclear. Of course we end up with unclear chains of responsibility being the norm!
I do suspect that a world where executives are held responsible by default would involve much smaller companies than we see today. And that seems just fine. If a company of 38,000 people can make dozens of false police reports resulting in arrest and jail time and get away with it with no real consequences because responsibility is too hard to pin down, then 38,000 is too large for a company to be.
> Isn’t that the whole point of leadership? You’re in control, and in exchange you’re also responsible.
When contemplating giving executives that responsibility, are we going to give the needed flexibility to immediately dismiss employees who represent part of the chain of threat to the company's customers?
You can have almost outcome you want; you can't have every outcome you want. If you want strong employee protections, you can't have ironclad and exhaustive executive responsibility.
How about we make executives only responsible for acts that can’t be traced back to individuals under them? If a bad employee fucks up and makes a false police report, nail him. If the entire organization fucks up and you’ve cleverly designed it so it can’t be pinned on anyone in particular, nail the person in charge.
Being responsible for an organization you lead is distinct from the notion of being innocent until proven guilty. Proving guilt would consist of proving that the organization did the things it was accused of, and proving that you led it.
Person or corporation, a case always begins with presumption of innocence and then trying to prove guilt. It should be the same for executives of that company.
I'm not sure if you're speaking from a point of naivety, but the only point at which the presumption of innocence enters into the justice process is when you step into a courtroom.
Everything prior to that - in all your interactions with police, jails, prosecutors, before your day in court, they will all presume guilt, and will treat you like the criminal scumbag that they think you are.
Oh, and most defendants never even get their day in court.
Sure, you’d start with the presumption that the accused didn’t lead organization or that the organization didn’t commit the crime in question, then try to prove otherwise.
That's more subtle to prove though. Negligence and malice, while both resulting in the same outcome, do deserve different punishments. And my comment was coming from a position of "you have to assume negligence before anything worse".
It is actually much simpler. You should look at those who filed false reports without proper investigation of an issue and checking the circumstances. If they blindly trust their computer system that tells them "Report John Doe", it is their fault. They should have proper procedures to double check the details for such cases.
Programming bugs are unrelated to the issue.
I might be wrong, but if you submit false tax statements then excuses like "program bug" won't help you.
If you think in terms of promoting a culture of safety rather than finding the right people to blame, I think there are more creative solutions available.
Despite Boeing's recent problems, the airline industry is very good at safety. Government regulation has a lot to do with this. (And allowing Boeing to use in-house workers as a substitute for government regulators seems to have been part of the problem.)
In criminal conspiracies, we routinely hold all members responsible for the actions of individuals. If you and I rob a bank and I shoot the guard, you can be held responsible for my violence, even if you were just sitting in the car waiting to drive us away.
> Let say that I, as an individual, report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone, and then I do it again, and again, and dozens more times, resulting in false arrests and jail time for law-abiding citizens.
Isn't the legal concept here 'mens rea' 'a guilty mind'. In your case from the way you describe this you know you are doing what you are doing. The argument would be that in order for a company (or individual) to be liable the same way (if there is even that or a similar concept for a corporation) they would have to have a reasonable knowledge that something like this was happening and that they could prevent it given the large scope of rentals that they do. I don't think it's actually reasonable to expect that in millions of transactions everything can and will go perfect. It's simply not the same standard as for an individual that has much fuller control of the transaction.
You said after all 'report my car stolen when I've actually lent it to someone and then do it again and again'. So you know you had 'lent it to someone'.
Equivalent would be if you could prove that the branch manager did not simply make a mistake and not put the right paperwork in but that he knowingly called the police when he knew the car was lent out. In one case it's a mistake (or shoddy work) in the other (as in your example) it's intentional.
I’m sure it was a mistake. But after a couple of times, such mistakes graduate from “oops” to negligence. Why is Hertz not checking their records more thoroughly before reporting a car stolen? After the first dozen false arrests, why are they not poring over all of their camera footage and paperwork and interviewing every employee from the site where it was supposedly stolen before they report it to the police?
> But after a couple of times, such mistakes graduate from “oops” to negligence.
Once again I think when you are dealing with a very large number of transactions there will simply always be screwups. To insure zero defects would raise the cost of the good or service to an unacceptable level. It's bad but my opinion is it's not criminal.
What's interesting though is that the tech business (and software in particular) is probably the most vocal (say here on HN) when mistakes happen in some other business (or a software business that is not theres) but at the same time for what they do (their own product or service) they regularly turn out non perfect products and experiences that regularly annoy, aggravate and create problems for users. Now none of this gets people picked up by the police but who says that that in particular is the gold standard of 'bad thing to happen to someone'. I wouldn't want to be picked up by the police obviously but then again some companies crappy software can actually create much greater aggravation and harm than that police event.
Your argument applies equally well to the general population. If I lend my car to a friend and then get him arrested by falsely reporting it stolen, do you think the judge will listen to me when I say that it’s a big country and it’s not reasonable to expect a zero defect rate?
Filing a false police report is criminal, literally. Writing bad software is not.
The root of my complaint is the massive inequity in treatment between individuals and large companies. If you want to argue that companies should be punished for making crappy software or that private citizens should get a pass when committing crimes, go for it, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about. The issue isn’t merely that Hertz gets away with this, it’s that they get away with it where you and I would not.
I'm going to be the last one to defend corporation (or any other large faceless group) but your comment is preposterous.
>The absolute impunity with which large corporations operate never ceases to amaze me.
Hertz is likely to wind up getting sued and settling. They are going to pay to make this right. If they don't then the lawyers will have a field day.
>Let say that I, as an individual, report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone, and then I do it again, and again, and dozens more times, resulting in false arrests and jail time for law-abiding citizens.
If the bug was doing this only for a particular jurisdiction then it would be ignored by cops like you weould be. If you had the geographic reach that hertz does you could probably report 30 cars stolen.
Gosh, they’re probably going to spend hours’ worth of revenue on settlements, I guess that makes it alright then.
You’re right, if I spread out the reports, I probably could report 30 cars stolen before I get found out. Then what happens when law enforcement finds out? Are they going to ask me nicely to stop and let me spend a few hours’ wages settling with the victims? Hell no! I’ll probably spend the next ten years being extradited from one state to another, assuming the Feds ever let me go after convicting me for dozens of counts of interstate crime.
If you made as much money per hour as Hertz does then it would likely only cost you a few hours of wages too. It might even cost you less because not being some "faceless corporation" is an advantage in court and you'd have more bargaining power when negotiating settlements.
Hertz will probably wind up paying more than any normal individual would because Hertz has far more money. You can't extract blood from a stone but Hertz is no stone so the lawyers will sink their teeth in.
These people being arrested was likely not the result of intentional action or negligence by Hertz. If they're anything like every other BigCo this is a known low priority but that nobody expected could result in something like this so it hasn't been fixed.
You keep trying to compare this to some malicious or comically negligent individual filing police reports but that comparison is absurd because no individual has the massive reach that Hertz does so no individual could file 30ish false police reports without noticing whereas a corporation where everyone is just doing their job without seeing the bigger picture could do that.
You’re telling me that this is not negligence, but at the same time this was probably a known problem they did nothing to fix? I don’t think those two statements are compatible.
My whole point is that the comparison should not be absurd. Giant companies get all the advantages of being treated as a single legal entity but with none of the downsides. They’re giant machines for laundering responsibility. What’s absurd is that you can falsely imprison people and get away with it clean because “everyone is just doing their job.”
>You’re telling me that this is not negligence, but at the same time this was probably a known problem they did nothing to fix?
You're on a board called Hacker News and you don't understand the difference between a known bug and establishing that bug as the root cause of bad things that are actually happening in production. I think you're being willfully ignorant for the sake of your own argument.
Everyone with a large code base has thousands of known bugs with low priority because they are now known to be negatively affecting the system. There simply are not the resources to fix all these bugs. Nobody knows which ones (if any) are can actually cause bad things to happen until those bad things actually happen and get traced back to one of the known, low priority bugs.
Simply put, they probably knew there was a bug, they didn't know that bug could ever lead to people being falsely imprisoned until it actually happened.
>They’re giant machines for laundering responsibility.
I generally agree with that.
>What’s absurd is that you can falsely imprison people and get away with it clean because “everyone is just doing their job.”
The cops bear some blame here too. Hertz didn't imprison anyone. Part of the cop's job is to act as a filter for BS police reports. When you pull someone over who claims to have legitimately rented the rental that should get you to start asking further questions. Two organizations screwed up here.
When you said “this is a known low priority” I thought you were referring to the false police reports. I guess you were referring to a bug in a computer system? I’m not talking about bugs. At some point, someone had to inform the police that these cars were “stolen.” Either someone involved in that process negligently failed to make damned well sure the car was really stolen before making the report, or someone elsewhere in the company negligently failed to design a process where people would do this.
Mistakes do happen. If this was a one-off, or even a two or three-off, I could buy that. But at some point on your way to thirty false arrests, it stops being a regular mistake and starts being negligence. You can blame a computer glitch a couple of times, but after that it becomes your fault for trusting the known-glitchy computer.
You are absolutely right, and I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted for that. It isn't as if Hertz has any vested interest in this that would make them desire to make stupid mistakes like this. Arguably the individuals responsible for the failure could be culpable, but we generally do not do that for honest mistakes.
The proper analogy for an individual would be if someone with a mental impairment loaned a vehicle and then called the police. There would be consequences, but none would likely involve criminal (or possibly even civil) charges.
Continuing that analogy, the mentally impaired person takes in billions of dollars in rental revenue each year and you let him keep on doing that even after you find out he can’t be trusted to keep track of his stuff.
> Hertz is likely to wind up getting sued and settling. They are going to pay to make this right. If they don't then the lawyers will have a field day.
The thing is the potential fines they're going to face are nothing compared to the problems you'd face as an individual. They can easily mitigate such costs.
A bit more context: He's an influential writer and speaker mostly in enterprise dev circles. By HN standards his resume isn't spectacular: he's not the founder of XYZ or the author of some famous open source project.
He's been a driving force in giving programmers in large organizations the vocabulary and ammunition to win arguments that lets them write proper software and not shitty software. If you find yourself writing Java in a bigco IT department and you want to introduce stuff like test driven development, code reviews, or whatever else is just proper engineering practices, reading/watching some Uncle Bob is probably going to help you convince your coworkers and bosses.
He has some rather controversial ideas (eg he believes that "flow"/"the zone" is bad and programmers should never be in it), but you don't need to agree with all of it to learn something useful.
Software developers are not engineers. We don't take a standard test and a board approval process for a license. Therefore we can not have the title of engineer because with that comes personal liability if someone is injured, killed, arrested, etc... Instead we get to wear the title like it was a cool fedora but when shit hits the fan we can toss it off and point to our employers as the people at fault.
As an engineer, you should go into cover-your-ass mode; make sure all of your work is reviewed, all tasks are cross-referenced to e.g. a JIRA issue, which in turn will have more names attached to it.
Software development shouldn't be a one-person job, that way, accidents are never a one-person responsibility. And criminal code should be caught in its tracks, too.
"However, the penalties for falsely accusing someone of a crime range from none at all to potentially decades behind bars. It all depends on how the accusation is made, the intent of the accuser, and what is being accused."
Well the computer is controlled by a human, and the rental company is understaffed (the article mentions "poor office management"). This is why I blame the shareholders. Great power, great responsibility.
You would think that for a crime report to be accepted it would necessarily have someone's signature on it. That person is where the buck stops.
Furthermore, you'd think that after word got out about this happening several times, the police would start to look at lot more sceptically at an auto-generated Hertz stolen car report.
As a summer job I worked security / CCTV at a large shopping centre. I'm not sure how many cars were parked there on an average day 1000+ would be my guess.
Whenever someone would find a security person to "report their car stolen" first order of business was to walk them around the car park and to check for their car on the CCTV cameras.
I don't think I ever came across a genuine stolen car incident. The lack of scepticism on the part of the police here is mind blowing.
That's not really applicable here, because Hertz doesn't seem to have accused anyone. It sounds like Hertz, either due to badly designed procedures or employees taking shortcuts, can lose track of which car a renter has been loaned.
This leads them to find that a car that their system says is not rented out and so should be on the lot is missing [1]. They then report that missing car to the police.
The person with the car gets detained and maybe arrested because they were found in possession of property reported missing by the owner, not because they were accused of anything by Hertz. So at most Hertz would face civil liability under some kind of negligence theory.
[1] In most of these cases, the same lot with the missing car should also have an extra car present that their records say is out with a renter, so the total number of cars in the lot should match their records. There should be a sanity check somewhere that says if the total is correct, but a car is "missing", then they should identify the extra car, contact the renter who supposedly is out driving it around, and find out if that person somehow got the missing car.
> They then report that missing car to the police.
We're playing with words. That's an implicit accusation, our car is missing and we believe someone stole it. Furthermore, the last person to rent it out was X.
I'm sure you can spin this around legally, but the spirit of the interdiction against false accusations applies, one should not be able to play with the power of law enforcement and cry 'wolf' in jest, it's a critical public resource with grave consequences.
None. The question of liability for automated crime reports is an interesting one, though. One would assume there is a person responsible for the operation of the computer in question.
"However, almost every time, erroneously charged renters are still fighting the charges they received in court and all the fines that come along with them."
These cases should have been resolved immediately. There's a growing impression that once the criminal justice system gets hold of you, you are not leaving without paying for something, whether real or not -- see also the recent case of people falsely accused on account of NYC's bogus DNA testing.
> However, almost every time, erroneously charged renters are still fighting the charges they received in court and all the fines that come along with them.
This surely is the bit that makes it unacceptable - mistakes happen, but if they do I would expect Hertz to step up, apologise like hell, sort everything out with the law, and pay a substantial "sorry" payment. How are these people still in trouble? Is this a case of Hertz refusing to accept liability because they are scared of law suits or something?
Hertz doesn't have to accept liability; they made a false accusation, there's laws against / about that. It's trickier in a court when a company does it though, there's probably alternative laws meaning companies get away with it.
I mean look at the DMCA and the thousands of invalid takedowns happening on e.g. youtube. Different thing though because it's not a legal accusation, people don't get arrested over it, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Stuff like this is why I don't understand why a potential employer should ever have access to a candidate's arrest record. Arrests mean nothing. Only convictions should be significant.
Of course it does. This information is very interesting for prospective (or current) employers, clients etc… If they have easy access to this information, it would be stupid of them to ignore it.
Which is exactly why it should not be easily accessible. The false positive rate is too high, and breaches the presumption of innocence. (I'm not saying arrest records should not exist, though. It's very useful for the cops themselves. I'm just saying that non-cops should not have easy access to such files.)
Alternatively, we could have a perfect police which never arrests innocent people. But if we could have that, we wouldn't even need judges. Just have the cops be street judges, and let them condemn or release people on the spot.
Obviously, this would give too much power to the police. Judicial errors would soar through the roof. But this arrest record thing is exactly like that. By arresting you, they can stain your record for a long time, possibly permanently. The influence that has on your life afterwards is similar to a full blown conviction's.
I think that Hertz had a good reputation about 20 years ago when I started regularly traveling for business. Of course, it could have just been that the firm had a contract with them while I was young and credulous. Anyway, Hertz squandered any reputation they might have had long ago. I haven't used anyone other than Enterprise in many years.
A number of cops probabbly still still arrest you but last time I rented rental cars come with a ton of paperwork with my name, the car identity, dates times, and etc all over it.
You'd think it would be a pretty easy thing to say, yo look at all this. It would seem unlikely an actual car thief would have a bunch of paperwork / make a bunch of paperwork with their own information on it.
Granted most cops aren't super detectives but even the non curious types know enough to ask the right questions even if only to help the suspected criminal incriminate them-self, going down the path of what all that paperwork even is would seem to work there too.
The car was different in these cases. But yeah, you'd think any receipt from Hertz with your name on it would be enough for the police to think twice before arresting you.
I got pulled over because someone thought I was a guy who stole gas.
The cop actually (probabbly already doubting it) took me seriously when I said "no man that wasn't me" and I pulled up my credit card app and showed him a charge pending and he was all apologetic and said "yeah sorry about that". It was a quick discussion, no big deal.
One of those crimes I think only a random rural-ish suburb tries to deal with ;)
But at least that was a case where the cop actually decided not to do anything after I showed him something. Normally I wouldn't expect anything serious to go that way as if a cop wants to arrest you... they're probabbly going to do it no matter what you say, and talking (especially if it is serous) is not going to help.
But the car thing ... like any paperwork seems like it should help / make the cop wonder a bit.
This is one reason I always opt for a printed-out rental contract when I rent a car and they ask, "Do you want us to email you the rental agreement, or do you want a paper copy?"
When I was in New Zealand in 2017, I rented an SUV for two weeks. Except I unknowingly screwed up the reservation and only booked one week, driving off unaware of this problem. So about a week later they began trying to call my cell, but didn't get through because I switched SIMs. I proceeded to drive around New Zealand with no problems for the next week, blissfully unaware. On the day before returning my car, I got pulled over for being over the speed limit. The cop let me off with a warning. It wasn't until I got back to return the rental that I realize that I was a full week late. Whoops.
The checkout process for Hertz is extremely slimy. While, I was filling out the form, the checkbox with a childseat didn't mention any kind of fee, so I assumed it was free. At the end of the form (which takes about 20m to fill out), it says "some fee may apply". When I got to the rental agency, it turns out that "some fee may apply" was 100$!! I threatended them with a big 1 star review on yelp, and they lowered it to a more reasonable 16$. needless to say, i will never risk using hertz again. they've shown, they can't be trusted.
Is it safe to presume that the renters didn't keep any of the rental paperwork? It sounds like keeping the paperwork in the car could've resolved a lot of this on the spot. Not that this should excuse Hertz, of course.
We rented a Hertz car in Las Vegas for a road trip for 3 weeks. Afterwards they charged our credit card multiple hundred dollars for a navigation system, which we didn't order and didn't have in our car. We complained and they promised to refund it, but didn't do it for over a month. Finally we asked the ADAC (German Car club) to resolve this for us.
We have far too much interconnectivity between automatic computers and the legal system. Computers should never be allowed to file legal paperwork by themselves. We don't know that's exactly what happened in this case, but there are thousands of other examples such as copyright trolling.
I see a lot of people hoping for someone to go to jail. Who should go?
How about the CEO who made a rational policy of reporting vehicles stolen that aren't returned within a given time frame?
How about the engineers who created and approved a system with a software bug? A piece of software that functioned correctly 99.99969% of the time. That's slightly better than six sigma. How many of you can claim your uptime is that good. 30 cases in 10 million!
How about the product manager who crafted a spec with a hole in its business logic?
How about the front desk clerks who did not fill out the appropriate paperwork after rental upgrades?
How about the stores' managers who actually called the police and filed the reports in accordance with company policy?
How about the HR reps who didn't train employees to use the system correctly?
> Some of these were reported last year, and Hertz found itself paying tens of thousands of dollars in damages to victims in civil cases.
It seems the company is being held civilly liable. Which they should be! If the police shoot innocent people based on accusations then you have a POLICE problem not a Hertz problem (which, of course, never happened in this case).
> If the police shoot innocent people based on accusations then you have a POLICE problem not a Hertz problem (which, of course, never happened in this case).
However, some people spent two weeks in jail while Hertz "resolved" this with the police.
Precisely. Some people. Which means other people didn't have to go to jail because of better police protocols. People are released to await trial all the time. The fact that they weren't says a lot about policing in some places in America.
They recently had a lawsuit of $32 million for a failed website redesign [1].
It's only appropriate to assume that people (at Hertz) who don't know how to manage just their website, can least be expected to deliver underlying critical systems.
I rented a Hertz car for about a week and called the customer support line to extend it for two more days but instead I got a voice mail saying that this car was reported to the police as stolen. This was after I was charged over $220 for the extra two days. Thankfully I live across the street from the Hertz and just returned it the next day
There are apparently multiple cases of Hertz doing this, at least some of which apparently included the person having the physical documentation on their person at the time of the arrest, including the Steve Cheney incident and one in Louisiana.
.. do people NOT do this? Like, that paper agreement is the same thing as your title as far as having a right to operate the vehicle. Why would you NOT have your agreement? Insanity.
Print whatever they send. Print it: it is worth the effort: you will not convince the police with a phone but you might with a paper.
Digital is OK until you run out of battery or anyone refuses to accept your phone as proof.
When you hire a car you are just hiring a several-thousand-dollars item from a stranger. Either you take it seriously (and have a paper trail, hence) or you do not understand the risks.
I recently read of some hapless tourists who rented a car, parted it at a trailhead in the Santa Cruz mountains and when they got back from their hike it wouldn't start because it couldn't contact the mothership.
Seriously should be a felony to posses a device designed to remotely shut down an automobile.
I don't understand how someone can be arrested without first conducting an investigation. They're just taking the word of Hertz that these people stole these cars, and they're letting a corporation that is largely unaccountable to the public call the shots of who gets arrested and who doesn't. So what if Hertz says you stole your car? You need to gather proof first. Proof that could never possibly materialize if all you have is Hertz's flawed record keeping.
My City of seven square miles as part of a general obligation bond they have issued is spending $2 million to put in 30 cameras throughout the City.
The police and local politicians feel that most visible way to fight crime is to pull people over for any and all violations flagged by ALPR this will happen more and more.
Did I mention that the City is a heavily visited tourist City?
Expect more armed stops by police on "stolen" cars as well.
Sadly there is zero thought given to privacy "protections" either for the data.
The claim of a computer glitch comes from a lawyer defending those that have been caught up in this (so essentially speculation unless he has records from Hertz confirming the root cause).
Story seems more like an attempt to shake the tree and see if there are more plaintiffs out there... more plaintiffs means more grounds for pursuing a class-action which leads to more money for the lawyers.
doesn't take away from something undesirable happening here...
The cops are the ones investigating, and I'm sure the number of actually stolen rental cars is far greater and comes along with identity theft. But at Hertz some human should do a thorough check.
The person who didn't. You can't set up a system like this and have no personal accountability. Can't find a person who is responsible, the CEO will do nicely. A lot of games would smarten up if the CEO went to jail for this kind of human-less "system failure." A corporation is its people. The people are responsible for committing crimes. Refusing to check should not be any kind of defence.
In Australia, there are company registered cars. If it runs a speed camera, the company must either pay a lot or cough up the "guilty" party who would pay less but get demerits too.
The Australian solution to Hertz is give out company fines until they produce who did the false report.
No need to go after the CEO or related. It's not like Hertz is suddenly going bankrupt to dodge the pitful fines.
If the potential damage is more than the company can afford, then by all means, they should go after those running the company.
Last time I tried to cancel a reservation on the phone with them, it took almost an hour to convince the customer support that my reservation existed. During the course of this hour, they insisted several times that the reservation didn't exist. After about 20 minutes of this, I asked to speak to a manager and was flat out denied. Since their policy does not allow hanging up on a customer service call, I refused to get off the line until I was escalated to a manager, so over the next 30 minutes the support person called me several names, including "liar", "cheat", and told me to get off the phone and find something better to do.
Finally, I was escalated to the manager who managed to find my reservation and cancel it for me. Imagine my surprise a week later when I found out that my reservation had in fact not been cancelled and I had been charged hundreds of dollars regardless.
At this point I was fed up with their customer phone service, and resorted to emails instead. The same scenario played out again, and it took dozens of emails, credit card receipts, and 4 weeks of my time for them to finally refund me my money.
The whole experience was rather eye opening in an awful and surreal sort of way.