Finnish Police: If You See Uber Car, Call 911

emakinen writes: The police in Helsinki, Finland has announced in a tweet that if you see someone driving Uber car, you should call 911 (or actually, 112 in Finland). In an article in the local newspaper they have explained that there is an ongoing investigation to find out whether or not Uber is legal in Finland and they want to interrogate Uber drivers. Normally you should have a permit to drive a taxi in Finland.

Comments

Couldn't they just book one?

[TWX]

How about booking one, then questioning the driver?

I'm a little confused too, aren't Uber drivers using their own cars? Is there something that is supposed to distinguish the car from any other car?

Re:Statists will not go quietly into the night

[0123456]

My point is that there are potential criminal penalties enforced by the state if the driver of the cab isn't the licensee.

So what?

The British government thinks it's quite OK for convicted rapists to become cab drivers, so why would you care whether the driver is the one they licensed?

Re:Statists will not go quietly into the night

[TWX]

Guilty until proven innocent? Thank you for exposing yourself as a statist... You are the enemy, and you will be defeated.

Forgot to reply to this part earlier.

I'm a realist and I've had to deal with small businesses and contractors my entire working life. The one thread that nearly all of them have in common is they'll cut corners whenever and wherever they can at an upper management level, will cut corners at middle management crew-chief or foreman or section manager level, and the employees themselves will further cut corners whenever and wherever they can as well. In some ways it doesn't matter if upper management decides to turn-around problems, if their middle management layers and workers have other ideas then nothing will change.

As far as Uber goes, if a driver as an independent contractor wants to save money he may well reduce his insurance. After all, he's a safe driver, right? He doesn't get into crashes, right? What's the difference besides a few more bucks in his pocket? That works fine until he's involved in a crash and his insurance won't pay the whole bill for the extensive medical treatment for his badly injured passenger, or even where the other driver has no insurance and his commercial insurance is supposed to cover his own passengers in that scenario, except he doesn't have it...

Re:Wow Finland!

[CastrTroy]

Pulled this definition from Google.

In criminal law, entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent induces a person to commit a criminal offense that the person would have otherwise been unlikely to commit

It doesn't count as entrapment if you just use the usual method to book the Uber car. If the guy is signed up as an Uber driver, and being an Uber driver is against the law, then the driver is obviously previously disposed to commit the crime. There might be more of a case if they stopped a random guy on the street and offered him $50 to drive him a couple miles down the road. Who wouldn't pass up that offer?