More than 8,000 ride-share drivers flunked Mass. background checks

Re:More than 8,000 ride-share drivers flunked Mass. backgrou... by tn135 on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @03:59PM (#14045065)

I will take this with a grain of salt given the excessive criminalisation of ordinary behaviour. Even for horrible terms like "sex offender" we can not be sure if the guy was a rapist or someone getting a happy ending in massage parlour.

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Re:More than 8,000 ride-share drivers flunked Mass. backgrou... by shams93 on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @05:22PM (#14045749)

Or even someone caught peeing in public if you get caught having to pee in public you can get on the offender list even in cities with absolutely no public restrooms to mitigate the need for that.

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Re:More than 8,000 ride-share drivers flunked Mass. backgrou... by legulere on Thursday April 06, 2017 @02:24AM (#14048376)

The sex-offenders are just a minuscule part of the rejected (less than 1%). How is a history of violent crime ordinary behaviour? How are multiple serious driving offenses ordinary?

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Re:More than 8,000 ride-share drivers flunked Mass. backgrou... by thatcat on Thursday April 06, 2017 @08:16AM (#14049855)

Due to the nature of how they must be enforced these crimes are defined vaguely and arbitrarily in relation to actual risk to safety.

Assault, a common violent crime, doesn't actually require the person charged to have caused harm - no intent to cause physical injury needs to exist, and no physical injury needs to result - simply proving that one caused "apprehension of imminent contact" in the victim satisfies the legal definition of assault. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/assault

Driving offenses are also arbitrarily coded for easy enforcement - speed isn't as closely related to risk as following distance. If you exceed 80 mph in VA then that's considered reckless driving (a jailable offense), while no minimum following distance is enforced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reckless_driving#Virginia

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Re:More than 8,000 ride-share drivers flunked Mass. backgrou... by tn135 on Thursday April 06, 2017 @04:26PM (#14054265)

> How is a history of violent crime ordinary behaviour?

When you and me read the word "violent crime" we think of Joker with a bloody baseball bat beating up Jason Todd. For government a lady defending herself from rapist boyfriend could be violent crime. She was just too poor to put up a proper defence. I can show you plenty of people especially women from poor neighbourhoods who chose violence for perfectly legitimate reason but narcissist DA charged them and offer them 1 year guilty plea or potential 10 year jail.

I don't buy government's definition of "violent crime" to the slightest and refuse to treat the entire group as some evil people who can not even drive Uber.

> How are multiple serious driving offences ordinary?

Again it boils down to what "serious driving offence" means. A most of them are something which I would just laugh at. Failure to renew vehicle registration, excessive speeding, failure to stop and exchange information after a collision or property damage (most common for poor people).

While I would treat DUI as a serious red flag I will totally overlook failure to renew vehicle registration or failure to exchange information after collision.

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