And again I say, if there was a water department truck being driven around with a lawn mower in the back with a guy mowing residential lawns, no one would be imagining back stories about why this isn’t simple appropriation of public equipment for private gain. No one.
Only the police get this level of presumption of innocence.
Yup. When a Police officer comes to take pictures of your house, and said the insurance company sent them. I was very confused. Um what? I had made no claims and shouldn’t it be an insurance agent??? What’s going on here?
He then said that I should have gotten a letter. I managed to dredge that up from my memory, but the letter had gone right into the circular file labeled ‘whatever’.
But, but, but, why are you here?
My wife has to go through this a lot as a county appraiser in a very red county. I worry for her. They have very visible ID’s and wear orange vests. And they drive in cars that have county emblems on them. And they try to travel in pairs.
Yeah, I could probably get someone in hot water. But no point in it. It sort of makes sense but was handled poorly. If (a big if) he happened to be in the area 
Both my wife and I work for county government (different county’s now). We are often asked “can you recommend a good surveyor, contractor, appraiser” That’s a no no. We can’t. It would be unethical to do so.
Or use of his official vehicle might have been allowed. Just this month the police chief from a Denver metro city resigned after a scandal related to use of his official vehicle.
He used his official vehicle to drive from Denver to Las Vegas to visit his family five times. Because the city pays for gas he gets in Colorado, he would fill up just before leaving, and after returning to the state. That was allowed, and done with permission.
The scandal was he got a speeding ticket in Utah and lied about it.
I’m glad and surprised that the Utah cops didn’t turn a blind eye. No one is above the law.
For personal use, perhaps. For other work for pay, I’d find that hard to believe.
When I had a company car, all normal personal use was allowed. But if I was ferrying my wife’s clients (she’s a realtor) around, I’d be fired.
I also had imputed income reported for the percentage of personal vs business of the vehicle. And if I made a personal trip of over 300 miles round trip I had to pay for the gas myself.
Of course given the overtime fraud, double billing and pension shenanigans the police around here (Boston area) get up to on a regular basis, I can’t even imagine how any of this would be policed.
Theres a department in Wisconsin that lets officers take their squads home and use them for personal business. I’ll bet that doesn’t include use as an Uber!
The police do it. So…
Agreed. Why should the taxpayers pay for wear and tear on a cop car so the cop or cop’s wife can earn some money?
Similarly, my father taught at a university. One of the benefits was free tuition for immediate family. I took a couple of classes there over the summers and my brother earned his degree from there, but the cost of tuition was reported on my father’s W2.
BTW, I assume that personal use of a company vehicle is charged to the employee at the same IRS mileage rate (currently $0.625 per mile) at which companies pay employees for business use of their personal vehicles?
It was the actual cost (depreciation, gas, maintenance & repairs, insurance) times an estimated percentage of personal use.
Twice a year after I used the gas card to fill up, I’d get a notification to reconstruct the business car usage between the previous two fill-ups (~300 miles, usually about 5 days). My boss would sign off on this and it was used to calculate the percentage of personal vs business use.
Nowadays the folks on the program just hit a button in an app on their cell phones to classify a trip as either business or personal.
That’s a good point. I wonder if the cop in the OP is claiming the gas used in the employer’s car, for his personal work, on his income taxes as an employment benefit?
Reminds me of a co-worker of mine who worked in the LTD department of HR. She often had to visit clients to check in, see if they had any issues, and sometimes investigate potential fraud. One time she had a couple of clients she needed to see in Nevada (our company is in California). She decided to combine the trip with some vacation time and take a holiday in Vegas for a long weekend. As she was on the road, someone noticed her company car and the clothes she had hanging on the little hanger by the side rear window. The funniest thing was that this person complained to the company and made a comment about the “party dress” hanging in the car, so they knew it was an unauthorized personal use of a company car.
Now this friend was a butch-presenting lesbian, and the “party dress” in question was just a suit she was planning to wear at her client meetings – hanging so it wouldn’t get mussed in a suitcase.
For years afterward we teased her about her party dress. And everybody who hadn’t heard the story got to hear it. Some people get totally enraged when they think a company they pay money to is having it wasted by partying employees!
Because the wife’s car might get dirty going up a dirt/gravel road.
A county appraiser that that my wife works with is allowed to take a county car home. She lives about 40 miles from the office, and appraises homes in the area where she lives. Makes perfect sense. Maybe the LEO that took pictures of my house lives in my valley. Don’t know.
He had a folder full of houses that he was taking pictures of. Well I saw this at a distance. I would not swear to it. Mine was one apparently one of them. He went right to this big accordion folder as soon as I said it was OK and I was not kicking him off my property. Hmmm…
He could have been going to or coming from his work for all anyone knows. Maybe his wife picks up the file box from him at some point.and gives him a kiss for helping her out. Maybe his boss knows about this arrangement and said no problem as long as no one complains.
We can point fingers all day and get high and mighty on the internet like the other sites we criticize. Just because we can.
In each of these scenarios, it still seems inappropriate to me. I have yet to see an explanation that would make it ok in my opinion even if it’s legal and doesn’t violate his employer guidelines.
Well then you just can’t be satisfied in this situation then. Even if his department and the people of his town are OK with it. Tough crowd.
Improper and illegal aren’t the same thing.
Now you’re starting to get it!
Police departments and townspeople have been just fine with all kinds of heinous shit over the years.