Legal News

New Law Implicates Gas Station Owners in Gas-N-Go Schemes

By Dan Slater

Patrons wait in line to fill their tanks at a RaceTrac gas station in Shreveport, La., Sept. 1, 2005. (AP Photo/Shreveport Times, Greg Pearson)

The ‘ole gas-n-go, in which drivers fill up their cars and then abscond without paying, has always been illegal. But, in an odd development, beginning October 15, gas station owners and attendants in Shreveport, Louisiana, will share the blame.

Since January, according to this story in the Shreveport Times, local police have recorded more than 200 drive-off calls — a 43 percent increase over last year’s total. Officers have made six arrests in 2008 cases. The new law will increase profits and decrease thefts, police say.

Police Chief Henry Whitehorn authored the ordinance. It’s intended to make businesses tighten their security and cut back on police man-hours that could be spent investigating other crimes. The upshot: Attendants and their bosses face a fine or jail time if a fuel theft happens on their watch. “One of the biggest things that we try to do is prevent crime from happening,” Whitehorn told city council members. “This is a crime that could be easily prevented by requiring that [customers] prepay.”

“We can sell gas either way,” said Hank Heithaus, the president of Murphy USA, which owns a gas station division. “It’s just a lot more customer unfriendly. What this does — it just slows up the transaction a bit.”

“This is the wrong way to get crime statistics down,” said Monty Walford, a city council member who voted against the ordinance. “I frankly think that it’s not government’s place to tell a business how they have to collect money. Are we next going to ask grocery stores to require a deposit before you go in?”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 19, 2008 (boomark / email).