[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.

[phpisthebest]

you are too caught up on if Hertz did it deliberately, that is not the test. Reasonableness, / Reasonable person is the test.

1. Would a Reasonable person believe the system would lead to false reports

2. Were there any engineers or people internal to the company raising concerns that were ignored by managers / executives (I believe there likely was and there is more than enough probable cause for police to get a search warrant to find out)

3. After the first reports came in what actions were taken by the company

[ajross]

Those are all excellent questions! Where's the evidence for affirmative answers to any of them? The fact that you can construct a case in your head isn't very interesting to me. What we know about the real world tells us that the answers are probably "yes", "no", and "nothing criminal".

To be blunt: be real. No one at Hertz is going to jail over this. They fucked up, and have admitted so as part of this settlement. That's all the justice you're going to get. I'm sorry.