
Uber Driver Charged with Attempted Murder Had an ‘Extensive Criminal Record’ - taylorbuley
http://observer.com/2016/05/uber-driver-charged-with-attempted-murder-had-an-extensive-criminal-record/
======
rco8786
Brings up the broader question of "are people with criminal records simply
unhireable?"

Give people a second chance, a few of them screw up, and it's your fault for
hiring anyone with a record. Don't give anyone a second chance, and having a
criminal record becomes a ticket to lifelong unemployment.

~~~
DannyBee
If the point is rehabilitation, and you never give anyone an actual second
chance, ....

If the point is punishment, well, the reoffense rate for those prisoners that
never are put into rehabilitation programs is 67% after 3 years, and 75% after
5 years.

[http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welco...](http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welcome.aspx)

So i'm going to suggest that unless we have a scheme for warehousing large
numbers of people pretty much forever, and supporting them, we literally have
to do something different.

~~~
morley
The source you cited never mentions rehabilitation programs; just that 67% or
prisoners reoffend after 3 years, rehabilitation program or no. Am I missing
something?

~~~
DannyBee
(not sure why you were downvoted) IF you dig into their links, you can get to
the data that separates out those in some sort of rehabilitation program and
those not.

------
Fricken
Calgary's Mayor Naheed Nenshi was caught off the record a few months ago by a
Lyft driver using Periscope speaking candidly about the city's headaches with
Uber.

After filing a court injunction against Uber, part of which insisted Uber do
background checks on it's drivers, the city sent some people with bad records
to apply as Uber drivers to see if they could get through, and if course,
Ubers claim to background checks turned out to be BS. Uber was discovered to
have contracted registered sex offenders and drivers with violent criminal
histories.

[https://youtu.be/YKglTLcw2rs](https://youtu.be/YKglTLcw2rs)

(Talk of background checks begins at 5:50)

~~~
corndoge
Should we ban everyone who has a criminal history (violent or otherwise) from
every job on the planet? If someone got in a bar fight and was convicted for
assault ("has a violent criminal history") twenty years ago should that
preclude them from driving an Uber?

"He/she has a criminal record" is too often the end of consideration for any
position and it's really sad.

Edit: Not saying that Uber shouldn't background check, they should. I only
meant what I said, nothing more. I don't work for Uber.

~~~
antihero
Depends on the crime, if you've nicked something from a shop as a kid or sold
a bit of blow, who gives a shit? If it's a violent or sexual crime, probably
not great to employ someone in a job where they can drive drunk people to
places.

~~~
gambiting
If you got into a drunken brawl at a bar at the age of 18, you forever have a
"violent offender" badge. Should that stop you from getting any job in the
future? In this case - driving a cab?

~~~
st3v3r
Any job? No. But we're not talking about any job. We're talking about one,
very specific type of job.

~~~
gambiting
Sure, but are you _really_ saying that someone who was in a fight at the age
of 18, can't be a cab driver at say age 40? It doesn't make any sense to me.

~~~
antihero
Should be case by case really. If they viciously attacked someone then no, if
they just got into a punch-up then who cares, shit happens.

------
darawk
This drumbeat that Uber needs to do background checks is so incredibly silly
and naive.

The fact that an Uber driver killed someone does not mean _anything_ about
Uber drivers. The fact that this person drove for Uber is completely
incidental to their behavior. The idea that we need to start imposing
regulations to 'solve' this complete non-problem is staggeringly stupid.

If this were actually a problem, and people actually cared about this, then
Lyft would start doing extensive background checks and everyone would switch.
But they don't. Instead they ask the government to impose regulation
generalizing from the fear of isolated incidents.

Nobody asks the only question that actually matters: Does being an Uber driver
make a violent criminal more likely to commit a violent crime? If the answer
is 'no', then the only reason for sanitizing Uber drivers is to avoid these
people committing crimes outside their own neighborhoods, with all of the
racial and socioeconomic implications that has.

The soccer-momification (let's define that precisely as acts of security
theater: the TSA, licensure of taxi drivers, licensure of hair stylists,
etc..) of business is a profound drag on our economy and society, and more
likely than not creates more violent crime by preventing criminals from
pulling themselves up out of poverty.

~~~
URSpider94
I disagree with your probability equation. The question I should ask is "does
being a violent criminal make it more likely that an Uber driver will attack a
passenger?" I'd bet good money that the answer is yes. Being alone in someone
else's car, potentially late at night and far from home, puts you at an
extreme disadvantage -- it's a very dangerous situation that you would
ordinarily stay far away from, unless you had a good reason to believe that
you would be safe.

I am not in general a fan of security theater, but I think that doing thorough
background checks of for-hire drivers _for relevant offenses_ such as moving
violations, alcohol- or drug-related arrests and violent crimes is just smart.

~~~
darawk
I think if that is the case and it proves to be a pervasive problem, the
market will sort it out pretty cleanly. If Uber drivers assaulting people
becomes sufficiently common that people are willing to pay more, someone will
create a solution to this problem.

This is something that the market should be able to solve extremely well on
its own, without intervention from government. And there is no large
correlated risk here or dearth of information for the public that should
motivate the regulators to act.

~~~
URSpider94
I'm familiar with that argument. However, we've clearly decided as a society
that that's not the path we want to take. We decided that we want the
government to protect us from some baseline of risks, so that we don't have to
spend all our time on which transportation service has the highest risk of
being murdered by your driver, or which restaurant has the lowest risk of
infecting you with typhoid.

~~~
darawk
Yes, my point is that that baseline has swung too far towards protectionist
interventionism.

------
throwanem
It seems like a lot of people want to excuse Uber in this case, or want to
build around it an argument that we should be forgiving and not judge
convicted felons overly harshly, lest we make it impossible for them to
rebuild their lives. While I have some sympathy for the latter argument in
particular, basing such arguments on Hemming's situation strikes me as unwise.

In five minutes or so on the Maryland state district courts' website, we
discover that Hemming has considerable form [1], mostly around unlawful
possession of controlled substances and prescription forgery, although there
is a domestic abuse prosecution which doesn't appear to have gone to trial
[2], probably because it was treated as mutual combat [3] and both parties
chose to drop charges.

Would you feel safe in a car with this man?

Would you trust this man to drive a car for your hire service?

Would you consider it unreasonable to expect five minutes' due diligence of
Uber?

[1]
[http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquirySearc...](http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquirySearc..).

[2]
[http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquiryDetai...](http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquiryDetai..).

[3]
[http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquiryDetai...](http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquiryDetai..).

~~~
dajohnson89
If the only convictions someone had were the possession and forgery charges, I
wouldn't mind. The domestic abuse case, I'm not sure.

~~~
ghurtado
The larger point is that it shouldn't be up to the individual consumer to
decide which employee criminal records are acceptable and which ones are not.

Brands exist for this very reason: so the consumer can choose to trust / not
trust the brand at large based on their past experiences with the brand, which
are of course influenced by hiring practices, among other things. It is a
trust by proxy if you will, and it is the more critical for unsupervised
"employees".

If Uber wants to build a trustworthy brand, it is up to Uber to 1. Define
their hiring standards and practices loudly, transparently and clearly (like
every other large company does) and 2. Enforce them consistently

As it stands right now, (and you may feel differently) I am not the kind of
consumer that would do business with a company that leaves it up to the
consumer to figure out whether their employees are violent criminals or not.

------
cdubzzz
> It seems like an Uber driver is charged with a violent crime nearly every
> day.

Every. day.

> [...] just three days ago, we reported on a driver who was arrested for
> strangling a college student in a dorm parking lot.

Three days ago...

> A month ago, a Hawaii Uber driver was arrested for raping a teenage
> passenger.

Over a month ago.

But every day!

~~~
cmdrfred
> After placing Mr. Hemming in handcuffs, officers also found a needle cap, a
> prescription vial, a syringe, rubber tie off straps, live shotgun shells,
> live handgun rounds, a pill bottle, a metal pill holder, a handcuff key,
> garden clippers and a pocket knife in his pants pocket.

I see he was also wearing his pants of holding +1, great journalism guys.

~~~
CydeWeys
The way he wrote "live shotgun shells" and "live handgun rounds" signaled to
me his intent to be alarmist rather than factual. Live as opposed to, what,
inert? Inert rounds are way harder to get your hands on. Live rounds cost
cents each and can be bought at tens of thousands of store with nothing beyond
proof of age. Having ammunition means nothing and is completely routine to a
very large swath of the country. Clarifying that it's "live" is using alarmist
scare words.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I've yet to see anything in the "tens of thousands" in a retail setting except
maybe .22LR on a pallet being delivered to Walmart and no round is cheap
enough that an individual buys tens of thousands for personal use in one
transaction.

I totally agree that the language came off as alarmist but find it amusing
that you're alarmist in your response.

~~~
CydeWeys
Can be bought _at_ tens of thousands of stores. I wasn't saying anything about
quantity of purchase. And the reason I said that was to illustrate how utterly
mundane it is to be able to purchase ammunition, including in Walmarts across
most of the country.

How am I being alarmist? Be specific.

------
jhayward
Given Mr. Hemming's extensive record it seems unlikely a background check
would have cleared him. So the conclusion is either that Uber didn't do one,
or that Hemming falsified his identity.

Fingerprints are the standard way of preventing falsified identity in criminal
background checks. Just what Uber and Lyft insist are useless would have
prevented Hemming's hiring, most likely.

Funny that a lot of cities are insisting on "useless" fingerprint checks now,
isn't it.

------
Scaevolus
I wonder what that $1/ride "Safe Rides Fee" is for, if not to run background
checks?

