Extremely Lame

Oh great, what has Florida done now?

Well, for starters, they’ve impounded fined a 78 year old man and impounded his car for running an illegal taxi operation. The problem? He was being a nice old man and gave someone a ride from the grocery store. Turns out that the person that approached him and begged for a ride was an undercover government employee.

It wasn’t as if he was charging her (and I don’t even know why this has to be regulated by the government in the first place), and it wasn’t as if he went up to her. Hell, he went inside the grocery store, did his shopping, came out, and  only once he saw that she was still there did he give her a ride. Wow, some business model, there.

“She asked me, ‘Do I do a service?’” O’Neil said. “I told her no. She said, ‘I need help getting home.’”

O’Neil told the woman if she was still there when he finished his shopping, he would give her a ride. She was, so he did.

Once she was dropped off, he was immediately fined $2000 and his minivan was impounded. Thank you for keeping us safe from geriatric good samaritans. I feel so much safer now.

There are plenty of fishy things about this entire nonsense. First off, she asks him if he’s running a service. He says no. He doesn’t even bring up charging her for the ride; she does. And when asked, he tells her that she can give whatever she can. After this, she demands to give him a specific price.

That’s four actions she had to do to get him to fall prey to her entrapment.

1. She approached him
2. She asked him if he ran a service, to which he replied, “No.”
3. She asked him how much he was charging. He didn’t give her a specific amount.
4. She demanded a set price of him.

And yet, the idiocy hasn’t even reached the high water mark yet. They don’t think it’s entrapment. Why?

“It’s not entrapment because she didn’t expect him to provide her transportation,” said Sonya Perez, a spokeswoman for the consumer services department.

That has got to be one of the most staggeringly idiotic rationalizations for why what they’re doing isn’t completely asinine. It’s not entrapment to string up snare after snare after snare because, “Well, shucks, I didn’t think the poor bastard would actually believe my sob story!”

That’s like an undercover cop car tailgating someone that’s going the speed limit, pulling the vehicle over when the driver speeds up to get the car off their ass, and then saying it’s not entrapment because the officer didn’t actually think the car would speed up.

Way to go Miami. You guys suck. It’s official.