> These 118 con men and women were posing as contractors & preying on innocent homeowners in Hillsborough County, who were just looking to repair or improve their home," said Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister
I am almost certain that's not what happened. Unless they each lied about having a contractors' license when asked, they didn't "pose" as anything, and aren't conning anyone.
Based on the examples in this article, is there anything that doesn't require a license to do? Unhooking a toilet is apparently an advanced skill in Florida.
I guess this is my reminder to give some more to www.ij.org
>> These 118 con men and women were posing as contractors & preying on innocent homeowners
> I am almost certain that's not what happened.
Right you are:
"When the handyman says no, then the undercover detective moves the conversation to something else and then comes back to the question later in a different way," says Sammis. "By the time the handyman gets to the location, they want to make the homeowner happy and end up agreeing to perform work that they didn't intend on doing when they first arrived. The undercover detective[s] are just creating a crime that probably wouldn't occur otherwise."
Not quite, it's causing someone to commit a crime they wouldn't ordinarily commit, so it all depends how pushy they were about it. If you could argue they coerced the contractors into doing the work, that's entrapment. But inviting them over under false pretenses and then simply asking them to commit a crime, while of questionable value to the community, isn't entrapment.
No. There's some sort of legal sophistry that helps them get away with it, and even if there weren't there's always the fall back of qualified immunity.
> Unhooking a toilet is apparently an advanced skill in Florida.
I am a former licensed master plumber, and I still hold a license to work as a plumber so I just want to weigh in here. I would never, Not Ever drink the water in Any industrial or commercial complex. Period. The reason is because although it is not technically difficult to "unhook a toliet" as you say it is even easier (especially now with the advent of Home Depot and Amazon selling all manner of "plumbing contraptions") to inadverntly create a potential cross conection. Here is the reason I do not drink the water (or or soda or soup or anything that uses their water supply): when I was a plumbing contractor one of my accounts was a wire and plating facility that made a lot of different automotive fasteners and what not (pretty cool mavhines btw), one day I walked into the plating room And I was Horrifired to see washing machine hoses attached to spigots literally laying in the plating solutions that contained Cyanide... no vacuum breakers no RPZ's (reduced pressure zone devices) nothing to protect the water supply from siphoning Cyanide back into it. Fuck that noise--never since have I drank the water, nor never will I again. And
I have seen coutless cross connections since then in all manner of facilities.
Not to mention not having a clue about proper material and methods while working on on natural gas or LPG sytems and so on, and so on. You can do a lot of damage really really fast if you're clueless.
>The reason is because although it is not technically difficult to "unhook a toliet" as you say it is even easier (especially now with the advent of Home Depot and Amazon selling all manner of "plumbing contraptions") to inadverntly create a potential cross conection.
Please tell us how one can screw up hooking up a toilet so badly as to create a cross connection. It's not easy to confuse a 3" or better closet flange with a 3/8" compression fitting, and it would be pretty obvious to anyone who tried it.
> Please tell us how one can screw up hooking up a toilet so badly as to create a cross connection
Sure: unless you understand potable water and drainage systems, proper appurtenances, proper methods and materials I don't want you touching my drinking water supply. It's the same reason you don't want me typing random characters into your code. I'm not a coder, you're not a plumber.
And to be clear I used domestic water as an example, you could just as easily mess up the sanitary connection and have raw sewage seeping into the building.
It takes 8 years of working experience before you are even allowed to take a Master Plumbing test... and we aren't stupid people. There is A lot know.
>It takes 8 years of working experience before you are even allowed to take a Master Plumbing test... and we aren't stupid people. There is A lot know.
Never said plumbers were stupid. But we're talking about replacing an existing fixture with a functionally identical replacement. If you try to tell me that needs a licensed Master plumber, I'll know exactly what your motives are.
What about unhooking a toilet? Or installing a new kitchen faucet?
Filling gasoline into your car is extremely dangerous too, which is why in Oregon and New Jersey trained professionals are the only ones allowed to perform the task.
Ha ha! Wait, you are joking right? I live in Oregon and they are about as trained professionals as the teenager working at McDonalds is a trained Michelin chef.
Yes, they're using sarcasm to ridicule their parent comment's claim that someone hired to just unhook a toilet should legally NEED to be a licensed plumber, by comparing it to similarly low-skill tasks "needing" to be highly trained in case something goes wrong.
I don't understand. They had a machine for washing parts where the water intake for the machine was pulling from an open container with the plating solution? How does this contaminate the building's water?
I think it's the case where the water supply (out of the wall) had an open hose that dropped down into a basin and at the bottom, made physical contact with a resting pool of cyanide-containing fluid.
Capillary action could possibly induce the cyanide fluid up into the hose, and/or backwash/turbulence could mix fluids inside the hose, and in just the wrong conditions, could result in some cyanide back-flowing up to the piping, to be distributed elsewhere in the building. As an extreme layman, I'd assess that as unlikely but at least possible.
I'm not following; you want separate plumbing lines entirely to feed sinks, outlets and toilets? I can't picture a single residential facility that doesn't have a shared feed, nevermind a corporate complex designed for efficiency.
>no vacuum breakers no RPZ's (reduced pressure zone devices) nothing to protect the water supply from siphoning Cyanide back into it
Not even the shutoff valve? There should be constant pressure behind the hose beyond it.
Direct hose connections can result in back-contamination. A drop-fill won't do that. There are anti-siphon designs, they are less assured as they may still fail.
Literally all a license is in many cases is just making sure a contractor has insurance and a bond to cover any issues. Getting a license takes less than a day to get And is a matter of filling out a form where I live if you have the insurance in place.
Not just a software issue in this case but a combination of software and non-redundant hardware in the default configuration with a single angle-of-attack sensor on each side. That missing sensor is far more likely to be related to bean counters than to software developers. Are bean counters licenced?
> Unless they each lied about having a contractors' license when asked, they didn't "pose" as anything,
It is often the case, legally, where offering one's services for work requiring a particular license is, absent any explicit disclaimer, a representation that one has the legally-required license.
I get that, and I get the rationale behind it—legally speaking. I still don't think that this makes the preceding statement correct. ("These con men and women...", "...preying on innocent homeowners...")
What really happens is that homeowners (and renters!) don't want to spend too much money on what they consider small projects, and handymen, rather than "preying" on "innocent" customers, are offering simple services for a low price. They're not conning anyone. I'd wager that most of the time everyone knows what's going on.
The statement from HCSO is written as if they consulted the Hyperbole Thesaurus to edit the first draft into something with more "punch".
I mean, I'm sure some subset of this bunch are actual scam artists holding themselves out to be something they're not. But my money is on the majority of them simply getting caught without a license. No need for mug shots and handcuffs and pearl-clutching public statements.
> Based on the examples in this article, is there anything that doesn't require a license to do?
This is what Libertarians mean when they say regulations make everything cost more.
This is what Libertarians mean when they say regulations make everything cost more / creates a black market.
In my experience, licensed handymen and contractors aren't much better. It sure is good to know that, while cops in many cities are giving up going after "low level" property crime, they are now so bored that they've got conduct elaborate sting operations on people for using a wrench on someone's leaky pipe without a license.
You definitely want your doctor, optometrist, dentist to be licensed. You definitely want your wiring to be done by a proper electrician. You want your new building signed of by a licensed Engineer. Etc.. General carpentry is a little bit different, but those with proper apprenticeships are considerably more likely to be better, but in that case, it's not a guarantee.
The wikipedia article you presented as evidence has some troubling issues. Much of it is focused on the fact that 'without licensing' there's 'more growth' in the given field of employment, which is obvious and mostly beside the point: the issue is competence. When measuring quality they mention "find that occupational licensing of dentists does not lead to improved measured dental outcomes of patients, but is associated with higher price" - which is deeply disingenuous because it's likely related to specific kinds of licensing as oppose do the 'material issue of competence' which is the fact said dentists actually attended dental school. Can you imagine for a second someone giving you fillings, scrips, pulling out teeth, x-rays without having gone to dentistry school?
What the state needs to do is make clear which occupations are licensed, which are not, and the kinds of work that can be done otherwise. Replacing a doorknob or a water faucet may be a bridge too far for licensing requirements, but doing anything 'load-bearing' for example might be within the purview of regulation.
Please speak for yourself. I do my own electric work and I can use an app to create an eye glasses prescription, though electricians have to be licensed and optometrist are only ones that can write a glasses script. How about filling up your car with gasoline? Do you do it yourself or have a professional do it safely instead for you?
>You definitely want your doctor, optometrist, dentist to be licensed.
>>Please speak for yourself.
90% of any profession can be jury rigged by almost anyone. The remaining 10%, including the liability behind their actions, is why they get paid to do it for a living.
If you want to superglue your wounds and run your own electrical grid more power to you, but none of us are islands and you live within an insulated bubble created by the professional standards of those around you.
> You definitely want your doctor, optometrist, dentist to be licensed
Expert systems have been beating doctors in correct diagnosis rates for years, yet the ego of physicians will not permit them to save more lives, in a fact reminiscent of "expert" fund managers trying to beat index funds and failing miserably. I'd love to see a study comparing physician diagnoses vs random-110-IQ-person-doing-a-Google-search diagnoses. My money would be firmly on the rando+Google.
Additionally, doctors and their staff kill between 250k and 440k (depending on the estimate criteria) Americans annually via completely preventable medical errors, making them approximately as lethal as lung, breast, skin, colorectal, pancreatic, prostate, and liver cancer combined.
The results of licensure in the field of medicine certainly leaves much to be desired.
Unless I'm bleeding out or having a cardiovascular event, I'll take my chances with diet, exercise, Google and WebMD.
This is beyond pale, I can't believe I'm reading this.
Steve Jobs thought he was 'smarter than doctors' when they caught his pancreatic cancer quite early, but he decided to 'eat healthy' instead of starting treatment which could have saved him ... until it was too late? And you're talking about doctors egos? Now that's one giant dead ego.
First - said 'expert systems' are only used in isolated trials, they're not applied in the field in general medicine which is much more complicated.
Second - applied medicine is considerably more complicated than merely 'diagnosis'. Tell me which 'expert system' is going to remove your pancreatic cyst?
Third - your statement about 'doctors killing people' is not only unsubstantiated, their 'error rate' does not qualify as the 'death rate' of any specific condition, clearly, you've misunderstood the data.
Fourth - if we didn't have licensed medical doctors, people would be dying willy nilly of every kind of easily curable conditions, moreover, arrogant idiots who think they know more than doctors would be happy to sell all sorts of toxic medicine and procedures that actually cause considerable harm.
Finally - this recommendation against modern medicine for anything other than major cardiac conditions is insulting, it's actually worse than anti-vax propaganda.
Effective regulation might be okay. Then maybe people like former Dr. Christopher Duntsch wouldn't be able to practice for years, killing and maiming dozens of patients.
Tell you what: let's divide North America into two parts - you take the 'anyone with a pair of pliers can be a doctor 1/2' and I'll take the 'actual trained doctor 1/2' and we'll see how it works out.
The reason why Sweden has similar regulations comes down to relative simple reasons. The state want homeowners to have home insurance in case something bad happen that would result in the state/city having to step in and pay for it, such as a fire.
Insurance companies want lower risks (and might also be pressured by the state to have lower rates). They want everything that is covered by the home insurance to be installed by a licensed contractor, and in the case the contractor is at fault, they want them to have insurance against mistakes.
And thus the government create licensed tradespeople to facilitate the above. Unhooking a toilet is not hard, but home insurance covers water damage.
Sweden also has a lot of social safety nets so in the case that someones home get destroyed the city is required to help them. Requirements for home insurance moves some of that risk onto insurance companies.
You don't necessarily need licensing for liability issues, just a requirement for contractors to carry public indemnity insurance and only work within its terms.
It is not necessary but the situation that the government sits at is tricky. Intervention like sending out fire trucks or giving health care is usually paid upfront by the government, as is social support aid in the case the homeowner become homeless. If neither the contractor nor the homeowner can pay it will be up to the government to foot the bill.
In theory, if insurance companies would give out public indemnity insurance to unlicensed contractors then it would lower the risk for the government, assuming the coverage is broad enough. It also assumes that the cost of getting such public indemnity insurance is lower than getting a license, or contractors would just get the license instead.
I would hazard a guess that the reason for the two licenses is different. For some reason braiding is classified under cosmetology, and cosmetology industry used to involve a lot of hazardous chemicals. In order to address health issue among employees who died an early death thanks to dibutyl phthalate, formaldehyde, lye, ammonia, and coal tar, the government stepped in a started to regulate the industry. It similar to how mining and particular coal mining has a lot of regulations.
Of course, one can braid hair without the employees being exposed to toxic chemicals. Still, cosmetology is even today regarded as one of the more dangerous jobs in terms of toxic exposure, and many employees do get exposed to nail polish, hair dyes, and nail polish removers.
There is also a cultural aspect to it. The demographic that work as beauty salons tend to be young women. Politician that drive harsher regulation in this area want to gain votes by being perceived as the champion and protector of women.
I was just on a job which was initially scheduled to include painting. The SDS for the primer was 17 pages long. We had to fit and train on respirators. We had to develop methods to keep the paint from spilling while transported around our work environment, and how to store and dispose of it at the end of the day.
Eventually, the painting went to another crew (whew). I saw painters on site wearing full bunny suits.
I don’t know if licensing helps here (I have no government license to paint in my state) but I would not want any random person to think any paint is as easy to use as any other. Just because it doesn’t cause immediate damage doesn’t mean it can’t cause serious damage.
What bothers me most about this is the statement: "including several who had past criminal convictions". The whole reason to put people in jail is to punish them. After they did their time the original crime should not be held against them. Not so in the usa where it's once a thief always a thief.
So run a background check on the people you hire, if that's important to you. But it has nothing to do with technical ability.
And do you think licensed contractors aren't hiring ex-cons to work for them? Generally only the owner or supervisors are required to be licensed, not all employees.
As the cities go dark, meddling bureaucrats will go to sleep hungry and cold, but warmed by the knowledge that they crushed someone who knew how those nasty hammers, wrenches and saws worked.
It's not the bureaucrats that want this legislature, it's licensed tradespeople who want it, so that unlicensed tradespeople don't take work from them.
You should be turning your ire at the hammer-swingers, wrench-turners, and saw-operators.
Why should house and fence painting require licensing?
I hire people. If they are removing a tree, replacing septic lines, doing electrical work, I want to see they are licensed, bonded, and insured. If their lackey screws up and hurts himself I want their insurance to pay. If the tree falls the wrong way and destroys my house I want their insurance to pay.
This is why I always ask them about their bonding and insurance and need to see evidence of each. Many never come back after I ask for that!
But if I'm hiring someone for painting, it's different. Anyone can do that okay. Along with minor household repairs.
Arrested? Good grief. This should be a fine, at most. Maybe if they claimed to be licensed and weren't, or forged documents that said they were... But this sounds like nonsense.
In Florida, the following scam is common. A person obtains a bonafide General contractor’s license. Using technicalities, he avoids insurance requirements. (This is trivial.) He sets up an office in a strip mall or his home. Then, numerous unlicensed individuals work “under” him. He may or may not make a specialty of obtaining permits.
It’s totally a scam, but it’s legal. If the entrepreneur has incorporated, he probably can’t be sued. What’s more, he doesn’t have to pay a penny in workman’s comp, because Florida has loopholes which permit multiple levels of “independent contractors” with only the top guy having a license, and a specific form letting the top guy absolve himself of responsibility for his “subs.” One guy got so good at this scam that he had a LinkedIn page and an IOS app you could download. Florida’s codes contain numerous devices like this. Most prominent is the “Notice of Non-Representation” that your buyer’s agent will get you to sign, just just just before closing.
I don't agree 100% on that because some crimes terrorize communities and nothing should be spared to fight them. But to jail house painters without a license? When one can go to Home Depot, buy the stuff and do it by himself.
They need to prioritize and if they have come to this, it means that the county is very safe and xx% of cops have nothing to do. So fire them.
Or that the other stuff is harder, more boring and dangerous to do. God knows I have embarked on some "safe" projects once in a while in the office to avoid the dogs.
For it to be entrapment the government would have to have induced/coerced the actual behavior of operating without a license. These arrests are the same as if a cop buys drugs from dealer and then arrests the dealer: the dealer goofed and can probably be charged with a crime since there is no coercion from the officer for the behavior.
Entrapment is a defense to a crime, and in most (all?) states requires the accused to prove they would not have committed the crime but-for the persuasion of the government (usually a police officer/federal agent type, but not always). It is generally true that if the government merely sets the stage for someone to commit a crime that does not rise to the level of entrapment - there has to be more coercive behavior for it to be entrapment.
Frequently, she says, officers will hire a handyman on the pretext of performing work that doesn't need a license, and then during the course of the job ask them to do something that does, like unhooking a toilet or laying some tiles.
"When the handyman says no, then the undercover detective moves the conversation to something else and then comes back to the question later in a different way," says Sammis. "By the time the handyman gets to the location, they want to make the homeowner happy and end up agreeing to perform work that they didn't intend on doing when they first arrived. The undercover detective[s] are just creating a crime that probably wouldn't occur otherwise."
I totally agree. The courts bend over backwards to not find that entrapment has occurred. The bar has been set very high for what a defendant has to prove. I think reading about the Portland bombing case provides great background on how hard the government can push on a person and have their actions still not be coercive enough to be entrapment.
That might not be entrapment but sounds like a fantastical waste of police man-hours. Isn't there more pressing issues in Florida to take care of first?
I think the point is that they refused once, and only under additional pressure from the undercover officer agreed to actually do the illegal thing.
If you wouldn't have broken the law without the police's involvement, I think that's entrapment. It wasn't a lot of pressure, and you could say they are likely to break the law under pressure from other people, but I think we shouldn't be prosecuting people for what we think they might do in the future, and instead for what they've actually done. And in some of these cases it looks like the only thing they've done that we know for sure is allow the police to pressure then into breaking the law so the police can arrest them and bolster their arrest numbers.
That the police have to ask you twice to commit a crime before you do it, doesn’t sound like a very good defense either.
A lot of people are implying that maybe the police bullied the contractors into submission, or formed some emotional connection and used that to twist them via friendship.
But there isn’t any evidence of that.
I think it’s way more likely that the contractors simply saw a way to make more money. They couldn’t refuse the second time because it’s hard to turn down cash that’s sitting on the table. They probably think they do good work, so what is the harm?
Now if we think that they shouldn’t be arrested, then we should stop this from being a crime, not castigate the police for actually enforcing the law.
Personally, I think this sort of thing is worth a small fine at most, and the law should be changed.
I can understand someone doing electrical work without license, but unhooking a toilet or laying tiles? It's obvious that these laws were lobbied to protect job for those that got license, not because these require skill or much of knowledge.
If you improperly do construction work moisture can get beneath your additions, and damage the structure of the house or become a breeding ground for bacteria.
This can mean more expensive work is needed in the future, or cause health problems.
My mother actually got a lung infection due to black molds that set in after an unlicensed contractor did some plumbing work. Since they didn’t have insurance due to being unlicensed, the reconstruction and her health issues were left to us to handle.
How would one know ahead of time what requires licensing and what doesn't? Does applying wallpaper? What about cleaning the clothes dryer's exhaust pipe?
Electric is obvious, but did the accused here actually know that tiling and painting requires a license?
> These 118 con men and women were posing as contractors & preying on innocent homeowners in Hillsborough County, who were just looking to repair or improve their home," said Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister
I am almost certain that's not what happened. Unless they each lied about having a contractors' license when asked, they didn't "pose" as anything, and aren't conning anyone.
Based on the examples in this article, is there anything that doesn't require a license to do? Unhooking a toilet is apparently an advanced skill in Florida.
I guess this is my reminder to give some more to www.ij.org