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

Wow Finland!

[I'm just joshin]

I'm glad Finland has no other problems for the police to worry about.

Re:Wow Finland!

[drinkypoo]

I'm glad Finland has no other problems for the police to worry about.

Yeah, I don't know whether I want to move there because they clearly have no crime nor emergencies to deal with, or make sure to never visit there because they treat the desire to interview someone like a police emergency.

Re:Wow Finland!

[westlake]

I'm glad Finland has no other problems for the police to worry about.

Law enforcement multi-tasks --- a concept the geek seems to find unusually hard to grasp.

Re:Wow Finland!

[tp_xyzzy]

> And the entire point of licensed taxis was to guarantee
> service at all times and to all areas at a fair price.

Actually, the reason why there's a permit required to start a taxi service is because otherwise everyone that had a car could start a underground taxi service. Almost every adult have a car, thus we would have thousands of underground taxi services in the country. They want driving a taxi to be profitable occupation, thus it requires a permit issued by the government. Ordinary people who have cars are not allowed to start a taxi service. Uber should follow the law, and get permits from the government for anyone driving taxis.

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?

Re:Wow Finland!

[Luckyo]

If you want to be a police officer in Finland, there's only one school in the entire country that can qualify you. You need lyceum education with good grades. Finnish Intelligence Service will make a background check on you. If you're male, you have to have finished your mandatory military service, and you're credited if you were in military police unit. Citizenship of the country is mandatory.
You have to pass a series of tests to be accepted if you meet all other requirements, which includes a personal interview, various psychological tests as well as written test, physical test and some group work.

You are also required to adhere to ethics code, which is very tight. Essentially you are assumed to represent the police force to people, and as relationship between police and population in Finland is very good, making police look bad due to your bad behaviour will get you ejected from the force very rapidly.
If you are accepted, it's recommended that you live on their campus (which is a closed dorm, and allows visitors only on permission). This is one of the mechanisms they use to weed out problematic individuals.

Typically this takes about 3 years. You complete studies with bachelor's degree in policing which lets you become a basic police officer. Studies include items that vary from relevant laws to criminology to physical conditioning.

If you want to make it a career, you will want to go for master's degree which would allow you to become inspector. That's another ~2 years of studies.

I know this because my alma mater, Tampere university of technology shared a sports facility with the police academy back in the day. It was right next to our campus, so I got to meet a lot of people from that school.

That said, in this case the police are likely being given the order to perform specific investigation from higher up. I.e. inspectors who are people that have master's degree in policing and relevant law and assisted by people with PhD in law as specialists.

Statists will not go quietly into the night

[mi]

Maybe, licensing taxies was a good idea at some point. There is very little competition among them, because their usage is sporadic — you need it, you raise a hand to hail one and take the first available without any way of figuring out the driver's and his company's reputation.

But Uber and Lyft and others have changed that. You can choose between these companies and you know the driver's reputation — and bad ones don't survive there long. A piece of government bureaucracy found itself irrelevant.

That is a very hard thing to accept and acknowledge even for honest men and women. For the corrupt ones — and, face it, government jobs tend to attract a higher share of such — it is something to fight tooth-and-nail. With laws, regulations, and PR-campaigns... Private victims of the old system may also be used as foot-soldiers against the new. It will not be pretty, but technology is destiny. We'll win, but not easily.

Re: Statists will not go quietly into the night

[mi]

I'm a libertarian and want Uber and Lyft shut down, or sued out of existence.

The only way a business is "shut down" in a Libertarian country, is by not making enough money — from happy willing customers — to continue to operate. If you want it to be shut down by anyone/anything else, you aren't a Libertarian. Thanks for playing.

Re:Statists will not go quietly into the night

[Grishnakh]

You have a very strange idea about how taxis work.

because their usage is sporadic — you need it, you raise a hand to hail one and take the first available without any way of figuring out the driver's and his company's reputation.

Absolutely, 100% wrong unless you live in Manhattan, NYC. Have you ever been outside Manhattan? I used to live in northern NJ, and I noticed that a lot of Manhattanites had an extremely myopic view of the world, and it seemed like many of them had never left the island at all and couldn't conceive of how life is very different outside their little bubble.

Let me clue you in. Outside of Manhattan (but inside the US), at almost any place except for a busy airport's taxi stand, or a few select high-density downtown areas (perhaps SF or Chicago), you don't get a cab by raising your hand. Instead, you (before Uber came along) had to find a phone, then find a phone book (remember those?), then look up cab companies, call one of them, hope they're open, and have them "radio dispatch" a driver to pick you up. You could be waiting 30-60 minutes to get a ride. After smartphones became common, it got a little easier because now you have a phone in your pocket and can look up cab companies on Google Maps, but the 30-60 minute wait was still there.

Uber/Lyft changed all that, because now you could just start up the U/L app, hit a button, and a driver would pick up the hail and start driving to you immediately, without having to talk to some moron at a dispatch office and try to tell them where you're located; the app knows exactly where you are from your GPS location, and sends that to the driver. Then, you can see just how far away the driver is, so if he's too far away you can cancel that hail and start a new one and let another closer driver pick it up. U/L put power back into the hands of the consumer, rather than the service provider.

The stuff about reputation is good too, but the biggest difference I saw in using the services a handful of times when my car was unavailable was convenience.

U/L really are revolutionary in multiple ways: convenience, reputation, etc.; I do believe they still need regulation, but this seems like an unfortunately case where many different governments in different places are showing themselves to be either incompetent or outright corrupt by attempting to kill U/L instead of working with them to establish good regulations, mainly because the established taxi companies don't like it and want to keep things in the 20th century, where consumers have no way of sharing information about cab companies and drivers and have no way of easily making use of them.

Re:Statists will not go quietly into the night

[hsa]

I live in Finland. If you suffer a hard crash, you don't have to pay thousands of euros, since healthcare is mostly free and in case of accident, they charge you like 15 euros booking fee and some additional expenses, if you need a room at the hospital to recover. But that is like 100 euros a night on public healthcare.

Insurance is mostly for the car damage (both cars) and it is required by the law.

--

The taxis are really expensive in Finland, the base fare is ~7 euros and you pay like 2 euros/km and there is extra for the drive time. In Estonia, the taxis cost one third of our prices and they have a decent taxi system.

For all this bureaucracy our taxi cars are mostly new, top shape and drivers get tax deductions on their cars. You would think, that they know the city they drive in, but half of the time they use navigators. You can pay by credit card and I have never been scammed in a Finnish taxi.

I am sure the taxi drivers are pissed, because using cheaper cars and drivers would bring the prices down to a realistic level (like less than 50% of current prices) and taxi drivers pay a premium to the dispatch centers for getting their fares.

Mostly taxis are used on friday and satuday nights, when people get home from the clubs and pubs. Having to wait 30 minutes for a taxi in a queue is common here and that generates a lot of fights, when drunken fools try to skip the queue. If some normal working man would like to generate a little extra income on those nights, that would be just awful - for the business..

Re:Statists will not go quietly into the night

[Grishnakh]

Bullshit.

The 30-60 minute wait is mainly because the taxi is busy or will take that long to arrive so that part of your argument is pretty poor.

100% wrong. If that's the case, why is it that I can get an Uber, in the same place and same time, in less than 5 minutes? Obviously, there's a problem with the cab company, not with too few drivers. Or maybe the regulation has intentionally constrained the supply of drivers and cabs, because the goal of the regulation is to greatly reduce competition and keep prices high.

And if things are working "well" in other countries, then why is there so much demand for Uber? If things were that great, they wouldn't have any customers there, because the riders would stick with the traditional cab companies.

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?