[HarryHirsch]

But... intent - Hertz had no intent to have customers locked up or threatened by out-of-control cops, so it's all good. When it comes to life-and-limb matters like this intent really shouldn't matter because it's nothing more than a get-out-of-jail card for executives who couldn't care less about the impact of their policies.

No one important at Wells-Fargo went to jail either - they set policies which were expected to have certain outcomes, but top brass could not have possibly have foreseen the outcomes. I'm sick of plausible deniability, especially when it isn't even plausible any longer, the complaints go back years.

[stainablesteel]

intent is one thing, neglect is another

[ajross]

It is for the crime that you're discussing. Filing a false police report is criminal precisely because of intent. Needless to say, if you have a good faith belief that you report to the police[1], you should be able to do so without fear of prosecution if you're wrong!

[1] And whether people like it or not, Hertz clearly thought this system worked at the time they reported the "stolen" cars; just like software developers think their buggy code works until the user reports or crash telemetry come back.

[phpisthebest]

The key part of the law is "know or SHOULD HAVE KNOWN"

They can not claim poor record keeping and ignorance as an excuse for filing false reports, they SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, which is part of the intent standard in most jurisdictions

1, 2, even 10 reports ok... they suck. 100's of false reports, that is beyond simple clerical error it would not take much to convince a jury that intent is there. i.e they internally setup the process that lead to false reports being filed likely as a say to cut costs

[ajross]

That seems to be assuming facts not in evidence, though. Did Hertz decisionmakers continue operating the system after having been notified it was giving false positives? I tend to agree that sounds like criminal negligence. But nothing seems to be alleging that anywhere.

Flipping it around: would you feel comfortable calling the police to report that criminal negligence? Or would you be worried about getting in trouble for a false report?

The system is tilted towards non-prosecution, and for some very good reasons. No one's going to jail here.

[phpisthebest]

If I was a victim absolutely I would be pursuing that with local prosecutors

>The system is tilted towards non-prosecution, and for some very good reasons. No one's going to jail here.

yes for high profile corporate execs it is, if some Teenager reported his car stolen but then found out a friend borrowed it, not only would the teen reporting the crime go to jail, but the teen that borrowed it likely would still be prosecuted for theft at the same time

Kinda like "resisting arrest" charge that is still valid even when there is no underlying crime to resist arrest from....

Your idea of " system is tilted towards non-prosecution" only exisit for one socio-economic class of citizens

[pessimizer]

It doesn't pass any smell test for filing false police reports hundreds of times to be a series of hundreds of mistakes.

[ajross]

You're saying that Hertz deliberately targetted these people for some reason? No, that's ridiculous. Clearly this was a mistake. No one thinks Hertz was deliberately trying to punish its own customers. They just messed up and rolled out a feature with a buggy fraud detector.

[randcraw]

Or depraved indifference.

[fallingknife]

Intent always matters. And it is absolutely plausible that a rental car could be marked stolen through a bureaucratic error. If fact, in this case, it's more than plausible. It's pretty much inconceivable that a rental car company would intend to just say "fuck you in particular" to a few customers and try to put them in jail.

Those customers should obviously get their judgment money, and Hertz should pay a heavy price (maybe even such a heavy price that they go bankrupt), but no one should go to jail for filing a false police report unless they intended to mislead the police.

[jakelazaroff]

"A rental car company" didn't do anything. Humans working at a rental car company did.

Maybe it was a "bureaucratic error" that fraudulently reported the cars as stolen. That bureaucracy didn't spontaneously emerge from dust. Humans built it.

Why should humans not face legal repercussions for the havoc they've wreaked on their victims' lives?

[xwolfi]

Because the havoc they ve wreaked could have been avoided, if only the police itself, a public service, behaved appropriately.

Declaring a car stolen by mistake shouldnt be the end of the world. One day someone with the same name as me committed an offense and I was wrongly given to the police of my country, and it took 5 minutes to clear me and nothing happened.

[shkkmo]

It Hertz didn't intend to ruin people's lives, they would withdraw the police reports when confronted with their mistakes. Instead, the company prohibits that because:

> A Hertz spokesperson told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2020 that the company has no “mechanism” to withdraw reports and does not do so because “In the rare instances this happens, if you report a crime, and you later say it didn’t happen, then law enforcement tends not to believe you if you retract it or say you were mistaken,” the spokesperson said. “Hertz’s continued good relationship with law enforcement is important.” [0]

It seems like there is plenty of intent there. The intent to continue lieing to police to protect Hertz's reputation at severe cost to Hertz's victims.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/04/11/hertz-stolen...

[SpelingBeeChamp]

I just searched the Philadelphia Inquirer website for that phrase and was unable to find anything. I also searched Google for the phrase, both with and without quotes, and with/without the words “Philadelphia Inquirer,” and I haven’t found the original source.

Are you able to find the source of that quote? It’s so outrageous, and is so not something that a corporate spokesperson would say, that I wonder if it’s somehow been taken out of context. Or if it even happened.

[shkkmo]

I doubt USA Today made that quote up, since it would open them to significant defamation liability. While I can't find an article with that exact quote, this article is from the right time period and does paraphrase a very similar sentiment as coming from Hertz: https://www.inquirer.com/business/retail/hertz-stolen-car-gr...

> Hertz has no mechanism to withdraw a criminal referral because, the company spokesperson said, it has to maintain a relationship of “integrity and responsibility” with law enforcement

[Sohcahtoa82]

> I was wrongly given to the police of my country, and it took 5 minutes to clear me and nothing happened.

That's great that worked well for you, but in America, I don't have enough faith in cops for that to work out.

The prevailing attitude is that cops have to be "tough on crime", and if some false positives end up happening and an innocent person goes to jail for a few days until their name gets cleared, that's fine. In the mean time, they'll try to find SOMETHING to charge them with.

Land of the free, indeed.

[jakelazaroff]

Yes, there should be legal consequences for the officers involved as well. Blame is not zero sum.

[HarryHirsch]

That's an assertion of belief, not a statement of fact. It's plainly visible that current policies have led to a rash of false police reports (the 168 MUSD judgement is more than sufficient proof), and there is no need why society should put up with the carelessness of Hertz. The problem is pervasive enough to go beyond isolated cases (after all they were slapped with an 8-digit civil fine). Civil law deals with damages to individuals, and criminal law sets expectations for society to prevent trouble. Hertz's incompetence has reached criminal levels, and anyone who rolls out intent as a defense needs to examine himself it that's desirable.

(Speeders, drunk drivers and violently abusive parents rarely intend to kill people but we still have laws on the books to treat such cases adequately.)

[shkkmo]

> the 168 MUSD judgement is more than sufficient proof

This is a settlement, not a judgement.

[halpmeh]

People should also be punished for gross negligence. Hertz filed hundreds of false police reports. After the first few, they should have updated their system. The fact that they allowed the continual filing of false police reports is a willful disregard for the safety of others.

[z3c0]

What you're describing is "culpability" and it most certainly does get considered separately from intent (mea culpa vs mens rea). Not knowing whether or not you were within the boundaries of the law is only an excuse when you reasonably couldn't have ever known, with no opportunity for due diligence. Bureaucracy is not ever going to be a legitimate excuse for not knowing if you were acting within the law, because chances are that you could have verified so with any amount of effort.