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Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

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Re: Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

#131

Post by DerekL »

FpUser wrote: post #32
pitaj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'd prefer customers be directly compensated than companies just be fined or people imprisoned.

I'd settle for this: compensate people losses, pay punitive damages and charge owners with criminal fraud. Also instead of blindly arresting people on a corporate whim the police must require proof of actual stealing. Even if car is actually not returned on time it does not constitute theft. Renter should be notified first and given opportunity to answer. The whole thing is fucking perversion of justice in favor of c…

I agree. “Someone stole my car” is different from “I lent someone my car and they didn't bring it back when they said they would.” Require the rental company to sue the customer and prove to a court that the car wasn't returned.

Re: Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

#132

Post by steve76 »

jmyeet wrote: post #15

Let's compare this to China where 2 executives were sentenced to death (and others to life sentences) for their role in selling tainted formula (resulting in infant deaths) and concealing it [1] or Jack Ma (of Alibaba) who just disappeared for 3 months [2]. It should be a legal requirement that a human review and sign off on any complaint about a stolen car to police. That personal (and company) should be held crimin…

No post body was provided.

Re: Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

#133

Post by z3c0 »

fallingknife wrote: post #14
HarryHirsch wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 pri…

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.

Re: Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

#134

Post by singleshot_ »

pitaj wrote: post #36
ethanbond wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't they be compensated directly for the financial damages and then put the perpetrators in prison for all the damages that can't be moneyed-away?

How does imprisoning someone help the victims in any way? People have some really fucked up ideas of justice. Justice should focus first on making victims whole, then on rehabilitating the perpetrators to prevent victimization in the future. Imprisonment serves neither of those goals.

There are four reasons to incarcerate, as near as I can tell:

Retribution: punish the offender. In the state of nature, if someone offended against you, you could hurt or kill them. Now, the state has a sanitized responsibility to fill that role.

Rehabilitation: give the offender time to think about and learn from his offense.

Isolation: remove the person from society for a while so that if rehabilitation fails, society is still relieved from having to deal with the offender’s misbehavior for a time.

Disincentivization: give others an idea of what would happen if they were caught doing a similar offense.

None of these overlap with “making the victim whole,” which is probably why there is a whole separate system of civil law for that which has nothing to do with punishment (excluding, of course, exemplary damages).

If you think there is no excuse for incarceration, then I’m curious how you’d propose handling the problems of sanitized retribution, isolation, and disincentive for crime. It seems pretty obvious (to me) that the world would be pretty gnarly if unrehabilitated criminals lurked among us, free to perpetrate crimes until an angry victim killed them just because they made a business decision that their crimes outweighed the civil penalty, and would be criminals saw this behavior and got the idea that it would be good for them to emulate the successful, unpunished offenders.

That said, a focus on rehabilitation for those who are deemed possible to rehabilitate seems reasonable to me.

Re: Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

#135

Post by jonny_eh »

pitaj wrote: post #85
xdennis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary reason to lock people up is punishment. It's crime and punishment, not crime and deterrence, or crime and reform, or crime and efficient use of taxpayers' money. Those are all nice-to-haves, but justice is an equal exchange of bad things done by you to bad things done to you.

I disagree. Punishment is not justice.

Never? What if it keeps a criminal from committing future crimes?

Re: Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

#136

Post by geoelectric »

CSMastermind wrote: post #57

I travel quite a bit for both business and personal reasons. This means I'm driving a rental car for 100+ days a year. I've tried all the major rental brands and Hertz is a terrible experience even when they're not calling the police on you by mistake. Their systems don't work quite right, there's a bunch of hidden fees, and their customer service is lacking at best. I swear by Enterprise and purchasing the extra ins…

Interestingly, I had Enterprise squarely in my head as the budget option compared to Hertz, who I always had down as the "pricey but better service" option (at least if you exercised the Gold program, etc.)

Not sure if I'm strictly a victim of effective marketing, or if they flipped places in the last however many years, or what, but it's interesting to see your post and the replies that imply I've got it backwards.

Re: Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

#137

Post by plorkyeran »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #128
ethanbond wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't they be compensated directly for the financial damages and then put the perpetrators in prison for all the damages that can't be moneyed-away?

> put the perpetrators in prison for all the damages that can't be moneyed-away? Unless it was done wilfully, this just perpetuates the American fetish for imprisonment. They should be fired. They should be fined. And they should be deeply investigated, to confirm there wasn’t intent.

They had an explicit policy of not retracting police reports after finding out they were false, so yes, it was done willfully.

Re: Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

#138

Post by [deleted] »

plorkyeran wrote: post #137
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> put the perpetrators in prison for all the damages that can't be moneyed-away? Unless it was done wilfully, this just perpetuates the American fetish for imprisonment. They should be fired. They should be fined. And they should be deeply investigated, to confirm there wasn’t intent.

They had an explicit policy of not retracting police reports after finding out they were false, so yes, it was done willfully.

[deleted]

Re: Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

#139

Post by sangnoir »

iso1631 wrote: post #113
CSMastermind wrote: post #57

I travel quite a bit for both business and personal reasons. This means I'm driving a rental car for 100+ days a year. I've tried all the major rental brands and Hertz is a terrible experience even when they're not calling the police on you by mistake. Their systems don't work quite right, there's a bunch of hidden fees, and their customer service is lacking at best. I swear by Enterprise and purchasing the extra ins…

We have an Enterprise deal with work so we get very good rates, especially when they drop a car off and pick up at my home or office However I was in one a few months ago and got a puncture on a dual carriageway. By the time I pulled over to a safe location the tyre was shredded. No problem, go into the boot to get the spare wheel out and I'll deal with it later. There was no spare wheel. Just some little device whic…

> Are people really that incompetent they can't change one?

I suspect they don't want people stealing/replacing spares in rentals with worn ones[0]. The mere possibility of this adds 1 more thing that has to be inspected and kept track of.

0. I once managed to run down the battery on a U-Haul by keeping the emergency blinkers on(!). I didn't have jumper cables and thought I'd hot-swap it with the one on my car to get it charged: which is how I discovered that batteries in U-Hauls cannot be easily removed. I ended up getting a tow truck to jump-start the U-Haul many hours later.

Re: Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports

#140

Post by nerpderp82 »

thelastgallon wrote: post #9

From the article: In its release, Hertz says they believe “a meaningful portion of the settlement” will be covered by insurance so ‘no big deal’ to them what they did to customers, at least for investors. Meanwhile their CEO shrugs in an included statement saying they “will not always be perfect.”

I don't think insurance should apply in criminal behavior.
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