Police must release reports on major bike accidents
[B' Spokes: This is from New York but I think they make a very interesting point (just the highlight:]
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As you read this column, it is likely that the A.I.S. has a pretty good fix on how all three crashes unfolded. Yet there is little chance that the squad’s findings will enter the public record. The N.Y.P.D. treats A.I.S. reports like state secrets. In 2000, when I was researching a report on 70 fatal New York City auto-cyclist crashes over the prior four-year period, my colleagues and I had to tender countless Freedom of Information Law requests merely to pry loose A.I.S. reports for 14 such incidents. Follow-up requests were denied.
A positive outcome of the Chen, Deter and Dershowitz deaths would be a law or regulation mandating that all Accident Investigation Squad reports be made available to the public. Many risky endeavors — from aviation and mountaineering to chemical engineering and construction — have become safer in recent decades through systematic combing of mishaps. Why shouldn’t traffic crashes, which kill hundreds of New Yorkers annually, be accorded similar treatment, and why shouldn’t New York City, a leader in public health progress, show the way?
The N.Y.P.D. will recite a litany of pseudo-legal barriers to releasing A.I.S. data, but not the likely real reasons: that painstaking reconstruction of crashes that kill bicyclists, and pedestrians, too, will reveal that in a majority of cases the cyclist or walker would still be alive if the driver had been obeying the law; and that chronic victim-blaming by the police and media will be exposed as a lie.