Admit it, now: when you learned that Kiefer Sutherland had been arrested, you thought, as I did, “Ah HA! I always suspected that guy wasn’t acting when he played those evil characters in “Stand By Me,” “A Time to Kill,” “The Lost Boys”and “Eye for an Eye.” He didn’t fool me by playing good guys and heroes since “24”!”
Today the reports are that the actor threatened to kill an Uber driver. He had ordered an Uber Black (What the hell is an “Uber Black”? Is Uber like Johnny Walker now?) after having dinner with a friend, or so law enforcement sources told TMZ. When the late Donald Sutherland’s son asked the driver to pull over and let him out, the driver wouldn’t, and after the third request, Sutherland threatened to kill him if he didn’t do as he asked. The driver phoned 911 for assistance, and requested a translator when the police showed up. The police then requested a Russian or Armenian-speaking translator.
What the hell?
The driver did not allege an injury, so Sutherland was arrested on suspicion of making felony criminal threats. He was released on a $50,000 bail, and has a February 2 court date.
When I was reading the account, I thought, “This sounds like a big misunderstanding.” After I finished it and learned that the Uber driver needed a translator, I thought, “No wonder there was a misunderstanding!” I also marveled, not for the first time, at how often companies (I’m looking at YOU, customer service lines) irresponsibly hire non- or barely-English speakers in jobs requiring English fluency.
For an Uber driver, the inabiity to communicate with a customer is even more inexcusable than at the McDonalds Drive-Thru. I imagine this scene….
Sutherland: Pull over, I need to get out.
Driver: “Eh?”
Sutherland: I said, “Pull over, I need to get out”!
Driver: “Uh?”
Sutherland: Dammit! PULL OVER YOU ASSHOLE! I NEED TO GET OUT!
Driver: “[Unintelligible]”
Sutherland: IF YOU DON’T STOP THE CAR, I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!!!!!
I can understand losing one’s temper when a car you are riding in as a passenger won’t stop when you require it to. Uber, Lyft and cab drivers—Hmmm, what other jobs? Are there 911 dispatchers who can’t understand English?— should be required by law to possess basic English proficiency.
Ethics Alarms 
So, in this scenario, the only thing Sutherland said that the driver understood was the threat?
That’s convenient.
I’ve had customer service experience in the past. It’s not unusual for customers for whom English is a second language to speak and understand the language perfectly well until you tell them something they don’t like and, all of a sudden, they don’t comprehend what you’re saying.
But a driver who only understands death threats? That’s a new one.
I’ve had similar experiences in my customer service jobs. In my current job I occasionally encounter people who are staying in the US long enough to take out a car loan but don’t speak English.
Well I guess you touched on some of the same things I did.
If I were a celebrity and an Uber driver wouldn’t stop, I might begin to think I was being kidnapped.
Uber Black is a service with professional or very highly rated drivers and luxury vehicles.
Even worse.
If the driver understood and did not stop, it is kidnapping.
I agree that there is a proliferation of people who speak little or no English in customer service positions. I’ve found myself in airports in this country where I can’t understand announcements because of a thick accent by the speaker.
However, I’ve used Uber in France where the fact that I entered my destination in the app was an advantage because I didn’t have to communicate in a language I don’t know. I suspect that Mr. Sutherland must have changed his destination during the trip.
Just yesterday it took me 30 minutes trying to reach a live agent to deal with a credit card screw-up. The first one I reached said the same inexplicable sentence at warp speed three times in an impenetrable accent. When I asked for the fourth time for him to speak distinctly and slowly, he hung up on me.
When I worked phone customer service, hanging up on a customer was a fireable offense.
Got someone very loudly snoring on the other end. After I waved down another for advice, learned the protocol was to be the same as an abusive customer: “If this behavior doesn’t change to something more productive, I’ll have to end the call.”
I have been hung up on numerous times in those situations. Sometimes I had expressed displeasure with the agent, but a few times I was cut off because the agent clearly didn’t know what to do.
“when he played those evil characters in ‘Stand By Me,’ ‘A Time to Kill,’ ‘The Lost Boys,’ and ‘Eye for an Eye.’ “
Deserving of mention would be Lt. Jonathan Kendrick in A Few Good Men
Seems many of Sutherland’s characters don’t inspire sympathy; FWIW, I’ve never deemed Nicole Kidman the same after To Die For
PWS
I should have included that weasel. Keifer just looks like a bad guy.
The truth is a vast number of actors don’t act. Their roles are literally just them.
Kiefer is raised by Donald Sutherland. I’m sure he’s a temperamental jerk.
But the Uber scenario is one where I’d think even a non-celebrity might feel endangered if their hired driver isn’t going where they’ve asked to go.
“The truth is a vast number of actors don’t act. Their roles are literally just them.”
Exhibit A: Sheen, Charlie.
PWS
Something is seriously wrong with this story; I smell a rat.
I’m going to apply a thin shred of logic and in the form of a question:
If, and I do mean if, the driver didn’t understand English well enough to understand a simple statement from a passenger, Kiefer Sutherland, that was ordering the driver to pull over, stop, let me out, how the hell can anyone believe that the driver understood that the words coming out of Sutherland’s mouth were threatening to kill him?
I call bull shit!
If this actually happened, I smell a money grubbing fraud rat at play here trying to set up Sutherland. If there isn’t an actual video or audio recording proving the claims of the incident, then police and Sutherland’s attorney should tell the driver to prove the accusations of assault and threatening to kill him or take a hike. If there IS a video or audio recording of this, then the driver needs to be asked why the orders of the passenger were not followed making this a rough equivalent to unlawful detention, aka kidnapping.
Now maybe there are details that haven’t been released, but as it stands, I call bull shit on the drivers claim.
I bet Sutherland never gets in a ride share vehicle again.
Irate is a universal language.
This was my exact take on this story as well.
–Dwayne
in many jurisdictions, avoidance of kidnapping is an affirmative defense to homicide.
It’s difficult to render an ethics verdict on a badly incomplete article. Was the demanded stop in a safe location? Did Sutherland make the request via the app (the preferred means for route changes)? Did the driver have enough English to do his job, but not enough when the ante was raised to a police action? What language did the driver use to request an interpreter, or did the police request that? If the police, how did they know which languages?
I believe strongly that everyone should speak my preferred language at all times. Alas, life doesn’t always work the way I would like. In my area, still undergoing recovery and rebuilding from hurricanes more than a year ago, there are many workers who have little or no English (hopefully the ICE profiling sensors didn’t just go off). So, they and I use a translator app on our cell phones. Works well enough that I’ve made murdering them my second choice.
Two possibilities:
1) The driver passed the same English proficiency test as apparently many of those granted citizenship, who often seem to have a similar grasp of the language.
2) They driver came from a country where understanding the phrase “kill you” in various languages is considered a necessary self-preservation skill.
I wonder what would happen if it had been Jeff Dunham and Achmed were in the car.
“I will cut off your head!” Achmed will scream, while Jeff drinks a glass of water.
so who do the police charge?
My guess? Neither of them.
The situation with Uber (and many of the other “gig economy” jobs like Door Dash) is even worse than that. Many authorized “drivers” have been essentially subletting their accounts to others who have undergone zero background checks. This is article from 2019 but smart money is on this still happening: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/uber-drivers-using-fake-identities-isnt-just-a-london-problem/
This is a huge problem in Europe. The app companies are complicit, as they are well aware that any given account is doing far more work than one human could do.
If the language thing is true, this is especially sad. (American) English is the default language in much of the world between natives and foreigners, especially in any commercial transactions. I’ve seen an Egyptian and a Japanese tourist conducting their business in English. Recently, in Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia, all our drivers were competent in English, as has been our experience all over the world.
FWIW, it sems like most everyone in Greenland speaks English, and all prices, even in Grocery stores are in American dollars (as well as Euros and DKK), so their transition should be relatively easy 😉
Thought experiment: If this were a self-driving vehicle, would death threats have the same effect? I.e, would Waymo or Tesla call for assistance?
Arnold Schwarzenegger rips the head off of the robot driver of a “Johnny Cab” in “Total Recall” when the self-driving car is too slow to respond to his instructions.
Oh perfect! (BTW when I searched for it found the movie was actually Total Recall)
“Drive” (with no destination) was not an instruction Johnny Cab was able to process… Here’s the clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3mH0K91-Gw
Ugh. I had “Basic Instinct” stuck in my brain because 1) Sharon Stone is in both and 2) The two titles have the same number of words and the same accents on the syllables. It’s how my files work.
Thanks, I fixed it.