Our in-house national treasure — cartoonist Bill Roundy — was appalled when he read our coverage about the NYPD's new policy to no longer send officers to the scene of minor crashes (especially since the agency is not answering questions about the new policy).
As we pointed out in our stories, if NYPD officers no longer show up at crashes, there will be much less enforcement of basic rules (indeed, even in minor crashes, at least one driver is possibly at fault — meaning that the reckless operator will no longer be at risk of being charged).
Also, if cops aren't reporting these crimes to the state database, chance are good that city officials will think the roadways are safer than they actually are.
As "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz told Streetsblog Editor Gersh Kuntzman this week, "This new policy might skew things unless ways of identifying high-crash locations change. ... A crash with no injuries is far from meaningless. The difference between an injury or not could be a foot or less as to the point of impact. It could be a difference of just a few miles per hour at moment of impact. If one intersection has 10 property-only crashes and one injury crash, but a second location had one property crash and one injury crash, I’d want to study the first one ahead of the second one."
If there is a better cartoonist working in the livable streets realm than Bill Roundy, we don't know who that is. All of Roundy’s cartoons are archived here.
