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NYPD Stays Silent On A Quarter Of NYC Traffic Deaths
By
Lauren Evans
Published Dec 16, 2014
Modified Dec 16, 2014
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By
Lauren Evans
Published Dec 16, 2014
Modified Dec 16, 2014
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At Gothamist, we make a good faith effort to report every instance of a pedestrian or cyclist who is killed by a motorist, noting in particular whether that driver was charged with a crime. All too often, the answer is that "no criminality is suspected."
And these are just the instances we know about. According to a galling report by WNYC's Transportation Nation, roughly a quarter of the city's traffic deaths are never announced by the NYPD. Perhaps that would matter less if the department's actual, stated policy wasn't to "notify reporters of every death from a traffic crash in the city."
One such unreported death was that of Douglas Matrullo, who was killed in a hit-and-run on Park Avenue between 23rd and 24th street. "We asked the NYPD press office for information about Matrullo and the hit-and-run that killed him," Transportation Nation reports. "After a long delay, NYPD replied with an old address and a name that they'd spelled incorrectly: Magrullo. We couldn’t find a record of anyone by that name - dead OR alive." That's a familiar tune for anyone in regular contact with the NYPD press office, an entity from which extracting information can be... frustrating, to put it euphemistically.
Despite the NYPD also purporting to publish all of its crash data, the agency's reported numbers differ from those reported by the city. Both of those figures are lower than those collected by WNYC. A spokesman for the Department of Transportation said the discrepancies will be ironed out by the end of the year.
While waiting for the figures to align, perhaps now would be a good time to acquaint yourself with our harrowing Vision Zero tag, which contains no shortage of disheartening posts on the many, many incidents that actually made it to our inboxes.
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Lauren Evans
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