Badr, who was a social worker in Egypt before immigrating to America in 2009, was driving to his part-time job at a gas station in San Ramon when a city license plate reader identified the vehicle he drove as stolen about 35 miles east of San Francisco. “The beginning of the process is this calling in of a stolen car that everybody knew wasn’t stolen,” Badr’s attorney, Matthew Haley, told the San Francisco Chronicle.  

Cops in about six police vehicles responded, pulling Badr over. Following officers’ orders, Badr got out of his car without so much as putting his shoes back on. He dropped them next to him on the ground, video footage reportedly showed. “All of them are talking to me at one time,” Badr told the Chronicle. “They’re yelling at me, and all of them have guns out. I did what they say exactly.”

Police told Badr not to reach into the car and to raise his hands in the air, and he responded by putting his hands on the car’s roof and dropping them for a short while as he tried to put his shoes back on. 

When Badr returned one hand to the back of the car, Officer John Cattolico, a dog handler, released a police dog named Dexter, who is a German Shepherd and Belgian Malinois mix trained to detect narcotics and assist officers while they are patrolling, the Chronicle reported. Cattolico released the dog about 10 seconds after Badr got out of the rental. Dexter bit into Badr’s arm and reportedly held on for more than a minute. “I never do nothing,” Badr screamed to officers. “I never in my life do anything.”

Haley told the newspaper police had no indication his client was armed, and Badr did “everything” he was told to do despite receiving “conflicting instructions.”

“There was never any shiny object. There was never anything,” Haley said. “If anything, he was trying to put on his shoes.”

Badr’s case is hardly the only example in which a rental car company was accused of weaponizing police against customers. 

James Tolen is one of several dozen Hertz customers who argued in bankruptcy court proceedings that they were wrongfully arrested. He told CBS News in November that he and his fiancée, Krystal Carter, another claimant, had rented cars from Hertz about a dozen times in 2020 when Hertz reported a pickup truck he was driving as stolen. He was stopped at about 10 PM on Dec. 23, 2020 while driving from a renovation project with his company.

Police used a loudspeaker to tell Tolen to get out of his car, lift his shirt, and back toward the officers, who were aiming guns at him, according to Tolen. He said he looked back at the officers while following their commands. He told CBS News that he remembers thinking he wasn’t going to make it home. When officers handcuffed him and told him what he was arrested for, he responded that it was impossible.”I rent from Hertz. I’m a contractor,” he told CBS News of the conversation he had with police. After convincing officers to look at his rental contract, one of them called Hertz and reportedly told the business to get a better system. “I was hot. Hot,” Carter told CBS News. “Like, we rented several times from them that year. Several.”

John Ayoub, a contractor in South Jersey, has a similar story. He told The Philadelphia Inquirer he was driving a Dodge Ram that he rented from Hertz in 2019 for work when the company accused him of grand theft auto and reported the truck stolen despite recorded calls from Ayoub to extend his rental contract. He was jailed for four months and left with no job, house, or tools, he told the newspaper. Charges against him were, however, dropped in Delaware and New Jersey when prosecutors were made aware of a $2,309.44 payment for the rental on May 29, 2019. Hertz defended its actions, telling the Inquirer: “We gave customers numerous opportunities to do the right thing and return the car before law enforcement got involved.”

The business declined to answer CBS News’ questions about its 165 customers targeted in bankruptcy court as of November. The company instead issued a statement claiming it “cares deeply” about its customers. “Unfortunately, in the legal matters being discussed, the attorneys have a track record of making baseless claims that blatantly misrepresent the facts,” the company told CBS News. “The vast majority of these cases involve renters who were many weeks or even months overdue returning vehicles and who stopped communicating with us well beyond the scheduled due date. Situations where vehicles are reported to the authorities are very rare and happen only after exhaustive attempts to reach the customer.”

Citing increased rental car thefts, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill in 2019 that reduced the time that a rental company is required to wait to report a vehicle stolen from five days to 72 hour. The California Public Defenders Association said then that the change “exponentially increases the risk that honest consumers will be subject to dangerous interactions with police officers now required to act as repo-men for the car rental industry,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Although the law requires companies to attempt to contact the accused person a reasonable number of times before reporting a vehicle stolen, Badr told the newspaper he never received any heads up.

He said the incident resulted in trouble sleeping, medication due to trauma, and “extensive and permanent damage to his arm and hand” leading to “significant scarring.” Badr told the Chronicle: “It’s not going to be normal like before.”

How could it be? Police allowed him to be mauled because of a suspected theft.