San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Car rental agencies’ errors endanger drivers
Imagine being behind the wheel of your rental car and a minute later getting ordered to get out of it by armed police because a careless rental car agent forgot to update the paperwork for your auto.
This was the terrifying situation 77-year-old Anita Conley found herself in four years ago when Enterprise Rent-A-Car incorrectly reported the rented car she was driving in Gardena (Los Angeles County) as stolen. Conley, who later found out the company forgot to update her rental paperwork to show she was still paying to use the vehicle, still can’t talk about the experience without her voice shaking.
“I thought I was going to die,” said Conley, who told me she was so frightened during her arrest that she accidentally wet herself. “This was embarrassing. … I’m a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record. … This changed my whole life.”
With the holidays approaching, travelers need to be aware of an inexcusable practice that has been happening in the shadows of the rental car market for far too long.
A car rental company using police agencies as repo men made national headlines in December 2022 when Hertz, an industry leader, announced it would pay $168 million to settle 364 claims related to its incorrectly reporting of rental cars as stolen. Lawsuits and media reports exposed systemic flaws in Hertz’s bookkeeping, like not recording rental extensions, falsely claiming customers hadn’t paid, failing to track their own vehicle inventory, being too quick to notify police a car was stolen and neglecting to correct false reports to the police.
Hertz apparently isn’t the only company, driven by shortsighted policies focused on increasing profits, to have bookkeeping issues that result in innocent drivers facing criminal charges. Budget and Enterprise have similar problems.
During the past five months, I’ve spoken with at least 10 people of color who were either
“There shouldn’t be a single-step process where a car rental company can send your information off
to a police department and possibly get someone
killed.”
Kamasu Livingston
detained or knew of someone who was detained because their rental cars were incorrectly reported stolen. It was almost always a result of clerical errors, and the traumatized renters were eventually cleared of wrongdoing.
Every driver mentioned in this column is Black. Hugo Ivan Salazar, a San Diego civil rights attorney representing these victims, said he has heard of, and has represented, many other people of color who have had similar experiences.
Black and Latino folks in America are statistically less likely to own personal vehicles than white people and, therefore, are more reliant on alternative forms of transportation, especially during the holidays. This group also disproportionately accounts for victims of police violence during routine traffic stops, making the consequences of a rental company’s mistake even more perilous.
In November, Conley filed a civil lawsuit against Enterprise. And Chaniece Decoud filed a civil lawsuit against Budget. Neither of the company’s corporate offices provided comment
about the lawsuits as of Friday afternoon.
Conley and Decoud’s experiences are eerily similar.
Decoud was less than five minutes from the Chino Hills (San Bernardino County) Budget location where she was going to return her vehicle when she was falsely arrested for stealing the car. Decoud had been renting the car for months after damaging her personal car in an accident. And she said she had been coordinating her contract with the company regularly, including the dropoff that day, which was delayed by a few days due to a family emergency — something she had also told the company.
“They pulled me over in the middle of the exit with seven police cars and a helicopter. I have chills from remembering this situation, because it was very traumatic for me,” Decoud said, adding that being arrested and taken to jail for the first time in her life made her feel “dirty … like an animal.”
She asked: “Budget did all this for what?”
This is a question Kamasu Livingston shares but about Enterprise. In November 2019, Livingston was in San Francisco on his way to drop off his rental car, which he was using because his personal vehicle was being repaired after an accident, when he was stopped and arrested. Livingston said he had been renting the car for months, regularly updating his agreement, and was not yet due to return the car but it was still reported stolen.
“There shouldn’t be a singlestep process where a car rental company can send your information off to a police department and possibly get someone killed. There needs to be better safeguards in place,” he said, adding that he remembers police yelling, dogs barking and being treated harshly when he was stopped. “It’s too risky for there to be one clerical error that could end someone’s life.”
Large rental car companies don’t post on their websites their policies on reporting stolen cars, including Budget
and Enterprise, which had not responded to a request for information on their respective policies as of Friday afternoon.
Hertz stated in 2022 that the company processed over 25 million rentals annually, with around 3,500 being reported as stolen. The company was accused in lawsuits in federal court and in media reports of having innocent drivers arrested for years before releasing this data.
Hertz’s recent settlement should be more than a wake-up call for the car rental industry. It should be a call to action for consumers to demand from these companies heightened scrutiny over their treatment of law-abiding customers.
Without true oversight or accountability, these companies will just keep using law enforcement agencies as their personal armed repo squads, all to protect a bottom line that in many car theft cases was never actually in jeopardy.