That excuse, thin as it is, could perhaps have sufficed for the first occurrence of such an act. But now it's been publicized. And it's a bit hard to pretend that, during a police raid, you're secretly and cryptically notifying the higher-ups, for some mysterious reason that you are completely ignorant of. It's just not credible that an intelligent tech worker who works for Uber and knows how to read English would not figure this out.