[B’ Spokes: I know the Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Committee has talked about incorporating "Bike Stat" in with "City Stat" so I am sharing this because the same thing could be said for Baltimore, we don’t track what should be important information about crashes. I’ll just skip through the article sharing highlights. This also may give us a hint why police here are so quick with "The driver will not be charged" in bicycle crashes.]
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By John Del Signore, Gothamist
This morning the City Council grilled representatives from the NYPD on why so few drivers face criminal charges after killing or maiming pedestrians and cyclists. … The department has been widely criticized for failing to issue criminal charges to drivers after serious accidents, as well as withholding the most basic details about their investigations. Today Councilmembers tried to understand why so many drivers get away with murder.
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"We don’t accept gun violence as a way to die, and we shouldn’t accept traffic deaths either."
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Vacca’s first question to Deputy Chief … was about speeding, and how often drivers caught speeding are charged with reckless endangerment. The answer came not from Cassidy, but from Susan Petito, an NYPD attorney, who politely explained that they simply don’t know, …
The NYPD reps frequently cited their inability to search for data during the hearing. At the same time, the department touted its TrafficStat data, which Chief Cassidy argued has enabled the department to reduce traffic fatalities by 39% over the past decade.
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Here’s what we do know, and it helps explain why so many drivers get away with murder:
* The NYPD issued more summonses to cyclists than truck drivers last year: …
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* The AIS will only investigate accidents in which the victim dies or seems likely to die. If you get hit by a driver and end up in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, there’s no AIS investigation. The patrol officers will fill out an accident report, and traffic tickets might be issued, but there will never be an in-depth investigation or follow-up.
* 241 pedestrians or cyclists were killed by drivers last year. Only 17 of the drivers responsible faced criminal charges.
* Asked how many criminal charges were filed against drivers in non-fatal accidents, the NYPD reps said they were not aware of any.
* Hayley and Diego’s Laws were created to empower the NYPD to issue "careless driving" charges, but the NYPD says judges have repeatedly thrown out these charges on the grounds that an officer has to personally witness the accident in order to file the charge.
And because traffic court judges have been throwing out "careless driving" tickets, the NYPD says they’ve instructed patrolmen not to issue them. Only the AIS is currently authorized to file charges under Hayley and Diego’s law, and since AIS only investigates fatal accidents, the law hasn’t done much good. Councilmember Brad Lander was particularly galled by this, asking the NYPD reps, "More than 3,000 crashes last year led to serious injury, and yet patrolmen can’t write a ticket [under Hayley and Diego’s law]?"
Councilmember Vacca recommended new legislation authorizing the NYPD to seize vehicles operated by speeding and reckless drivers. … as long as the default response to a motor vehicle crash is ‘accidents happen,’ the behaviors that are killing and injuring people will continue."
Also in attendance were the relatives of killed or injured cyclists, including Erika Lefevre, the mother of Mathieu Lefevre, an artist who was killed by a truck driver who left the scene of the accident in Williamsburg and did not face any criminal charges. (The Brooklyn DA is now conducting an independent investigation to determine if serious charges are warranted.) Lefevre, who had to sue the NYPD to release information about the AIS’s sloppy investigation, told the City Council, "The only person the NYPD showed courtesy, professionalism, and respect towards was the driver who ran over Mathieu."
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https://gothamist.com/2012/02/15/heres_why_drivers_get_away_with_mur.phpoldId.20120218153052144
Biking in Baltimore