I mean… perhaps, but is it really the police’s job to scrutinize the company’s records substantiating its claims of theft?
“The big well-established company is straight-up lying to me about this supposed crime that happened, and fabricating the documentation that proves it” seems like a heuristic that would not normally be the right one…
I’ve personally had to pursue cases where somebody just took a fleet rental vehicle across the country and started driving Uber with it. It was basically written off as “shrug guess we lost it” (!) until the org got a recent speed camera ticket in the mail. Somehow I feel like the default case that makes it to the police turns out to be closer to that situation than to “the organization alwa was working with just fabricated this bizarre tale on a lark.” It’s so much easier to just write it off as a loss, or handle it without LE.
I feel like it’s not just the US system that’s ill-prepared for well-reputed large institutions to fabricate tales of victimhood and extensive paper trails to “back it up.” Well… “paper” trails from poorly-implemented computer systems, anyway…
The UK police (and also their courts) were similarly ill-prepared when the Post Office and Fujitsu straight-up lied about missing money in the Horizon scandal.
>> mean… perhaps, but is it really the police’s job to scrutinize the company’s records substantiating its claims of theft?
Not only it's not, keeping the car for longer than you rented it for isn't theft, it's a breach of contract and it's a civil not criminal matter. So indeed, Police shouldn't be involved at all.
I mean eventually it becomes theft, doesn’t it? There’s some kind of line where your behavior demonstrates you have no real intention to return it?
The guy who took the car across many states and started driving Uber with it—he’d been assigned the vehicle for 3 days, claimed to have brought it back to the yard, but actually was using it to make his living every day for 6 months by the time we heard about it… surely that’s a bit closer to “he took it” than “he messed up the return date,” isn’t it?
Not legally, no. It's still a breach of contract and the company can sue you for damages and obviously for the value of the car, but it's not technically theft.
I agree that the UK also fucked this up royally. I don't think this excuses either jurisdiction. In both cases the legal system failed to robustly scrutinise the claims being made before depriving people of their liberty, and that is wholly unacceptable.
