Getting Away With Murder: NY Drivers Do It All the Time
The problem with the City Council members proposal is that, even if passed, it is not enforceable. In order for these policies to be enacted, the mayor and the NYPD need to get behind the measures.
And, as with basically every policy that he’s ever enacted—no matter WHAT the public response to it was—the mayor’s office is positive that he is doing things in EXACTLY the right way and that, really, we should all be happy that he is the mayor and takes care of us better than anyone else ever could have in the entire history of the world.
What the Mayor’s office actually said in an email was, “Many like to criticize, but traffic fatalities are at the lowest level in city history and we now have 30,000 fewer injury crashes per year—30,000 fewer per year—than we did a decade ago. Those results did not happen by accident—it’s due to the aggressive enforcement and safety work of the NYPD and the traffic engineering work the Department of Transportation.”
And, okay. It’s wonderful that the streets are safer. It really is. But that’s not the issue, is it? The issue is that when a tragedy does occur, it should get investigated and the party at fault should be held accountable.
Because when you hear the testimonies of people like Jake Stevens, who lost his wife Clara Heyworth to a drunk and unlicensed driver last year, or that of Jay Deter, whose father Ray was struck by a man who admitted to speeding at the time of the accident and had marijuana in his car, your heart breaks.
It breaks not just for the loss of these two people and for all the other people who are tragically killed, but for the absurdity of a system that feels entitled to stop thousands of men a year with a policy that is supposed to act as deterrence (stop-and-frisk) but when something horrifying actually happens, they step back and fail to charge anyone.
What kind of deterrence is that?