Let’s start with the punchline: Richard Greenberg has settled, with the auto repair shop agreeing to pay $15,000 and the New Jersey State Troopers agreeing to pay $135,000.  While the settlements for misconduct usually fail to meet people’s fond dreams, this one was pretty darned good. Excellent, really.

What happened to Greenberg, and started this gravy train, was something that happens to all of us at some point: He paid a guy to do a job and the guy screwed up.  In this instance, it was an auto mechanic.

The dispute began when Greenberg went to the shop in January 2007 for an oil change and agreed to a radiator flush and battery cleaning.

But when his car came out of the garage, it had trouble starting after several battery jumps. The mechanic told him he’d have to get further repairs elsewhere, because the shop did not have the appropriate equipment on hand, according to the lawsuit.

Greenberg claimed his car had no history of trouble before bringing it to the shop.

He paid his bill, including $15 he disputed for the battery cleaning, and drove it immediately to a Pep Boys, where he claimed it stopped functioning again.

Mechanics there told him the battery post “had probably snapped.” Greenberg paid $88 to have a new battery installed, he said in court documents.

So Greenberg stopped his check, closed his account (purportedly because there was a missing check as well) and sent the garage a new check for the amount he believed he owed. The garage owner sent the check back, cut in half, and called his local state troopers instead.

The owner went to the state police, which covers enforcement and patrols for Hainesport, to have a report prepared to take with him to small-claims court.

After troopers investigated the matter, Greenberg was arrested without a warrant and without charges pending, his attorney said.

While Greenberg was chained to a bench, another trooper told him, “You’re not such a tough (expletive) now,” according to court documents.

After 15 minutes, when Greenberg agreed to pay the money, the trooper returned to tell him he was “a lucky man” because the shop had agreed to accept the money.

From the  Payton issue, not the fact that a New Jersey State Trooper thought his job was to collect money for a local business from a disgruntled customer by use of force authorized by the state.  In fact, the court suggested that the Trooper’s suspicion that Greenberg deliberately passed a bad check, a crime, was sufficiently reasonable to establish probable cause.

Granted, it’s hardly insignificant that the appellate court recognized, where the lower court did not, that State Trooper
Nicholas Pryszlak did not have the power to decide, on his own and without a warrant, to enter Greenberg’s home and arrest him.  There are some basic things they can never do, and breaching the sanctity of a person’s home to arrest without a warrant or exigency is one of them.  It’s always good to know that Payton remains the law.

Yet, the fact that there was any question, any confusion, about whether law enforcement has a legitimate role to play in fundamentally civil disputes should scare the daylights out of us. From the undisputed allegations, there was a very legitimate dispute.  This isn’t good, but it isn’t the end of the world either. People go to a business and get service, and are dissatisfied. Sometimes, as here, the service ended up causing the consumer more problems than what he started with, and the consumer has an excellent reason to be upset.  

When disputes over a consumer transaction happen, there are courts to deal with them. Small claims courts, not criminal courts.  This is important, because we already face  three felonies a day by coffee break, and need not fear that we are powerless to question and challenge disreputable businesses without risking arrest.  There has to be a line drawn somewhere.

Trooper Pryszlak didn’t get the message.  This reflects a deeper problem inherent in the mindset of law enforcement officers, not only that they can do as they please because of their great power and insight, but that they are authorized to decide right and wrong in all human interactions. This trooper decided to right what he, in his infinite wisdom, saw as a wrong, a bad check passer screwing a local business out of its money, and he was going to make it right.

“You’re not such a tough bastard now.”

Are people who dispute a charge “tough bastards”? I think so, and I think they should be. Too often, people allow themselves to be pushed around, acquiescing to the more assertive person for fear of, what, being disliked?  Why, I wonder, should anyone care? Certainly the business won’t charge you less, on top of providing poor or defective service, because you were nice about it.  They rely on people being too polite or wimpy to be disagreeable to get away with delivering crap. So it takes a tough bastard to refuse to let himself be treated like dirt.

But New Jersey State Trooper Sergeant Steven M. Jones was mistaken when he spoke those words to Greenberg.  Whether his agreement to pay the disputed amount was a momentary lapse or a strategic move, he was tough enough to take the troopers, besparkled in their imposing uniforms that haven’t (as far as I can tell) changed since the fifties, with leather Sam Browne and, often, black boots to their knees, to their knees.  Greenberg was a tough enough bastard to get $135,000 from the troopers.

The law has enough trouble distinguishing criminal from civil disputes, usually hinging on rhetoric rather than reality.  In this case, there was no question that Greenberg had a legitimate beef with the garage over their having broken his battery instead of fixing it. That’s more than sufficient to eliminate any potential that his conduct in stopping payment was criminally intended, and it’s a shame that the appellate division didn’t make that clear.  But this settlement, both for the garage and the troopers serves as a small reminder that the troopers, no matter how awesome they view themselves or how they see their role as fixing problems for local businesses, have no business getting involved in civil disputes.

Now, if only the payment would come from Trooper Pryszlak’s pocket instead of the taxpayer’s, maybe Jersey troopers would get a real message that even they have limits.