Maybe I’m just feeling emotional today but I found the examples so distressing I couldn’t continue the article. How could a whole family just be killed off: mother, father, and their children, and the driver responsible faces NO consequences? Even if consequences don’t bring people back from the dead, they are still useful for signaling to society that we recognize the severity of what happened.
It’s depressing to think about their home where they spent their days together now just sitting silent and empty, one day they all left together and would never return again, everything exactly as they left it, soon to be emptied out and sold off to the next owners who will take over as if nothing happened. And apparently as far as society is concerned nothing did happen. Our lives really don’t mean shit to anyone but ourselves. Why are we like this?
Because the court just views as driving "accidents", mere oopsies.
There was also this driver, Raja Whitfield of SFSU, who hit and killed a man crossing the street at Geary and Gough. Raja was sentenced to pay only $58k in restitution. That's the price we value life here.
If someone hits a pedestrian or cyclist with their car, their license should be revoked for at least a decade, and they should be forced to ride a bike during that time.
I drive about 120 miles a day, and also like weekend road trips. I see so many accidents and fatal ones every now and then and it really weirds me out how people's lives are totally boring and average just driving down the freeway, and then just dead.
~100 a day in America on average.
Another depressing metric is that an Americans lifetime odds of dying in a car are about 1 in 100.
As the article mentions, the driver will have to deal with the knowledge that they killed an entire family by accident, which can’t be easy. Of course, it is nothing compared to what the killed family’s fiends and loved ones feel, but “NO consequences” isn’t exactly fair.
Which is also part of the point of the article: the problem is that it’s missing the forest for the trees to treat just the driver as responsible — one could argue the driver was also failed by the entire system described here, the system that privileges vehicles and their occupants over pedestrians, that treats death as an unavoidable, and therefore acceptable, consequence of vehicle use, which itself is treated as an unalienable right.
Where are the:
- fitness-to-drive tests every few years?
- geofenced enforced speed limits?
- protected sidewalks with higher boundaries?
- physical smartphone restrictions on use while driving? (Paired with your car, moving > 5 mph, single occupancy? Car mode.)
- traffic calming measures on major roadways shared with pedestrians?
- standards around signaling at crosswalks on major roadways?
- heavily subsidized transit that runs frequently enough that it’s preferable to driving?
Every regulation has a cost, of course, and many of these are horribly privacy-violating if naively implemented. But let’s be 100% clear what we are privileging when we make these decisions!
It would be less frustrating if our society was willing to take this systemic view of low level crime as well. But there are people in jail and even prison for shoplifting, or stealing a car, or such unforgivable violence as a punch that left someone bruised. Because yes, we demand a system that creates these kinds of crime, but no, people aren’t willing to think that way about anything except killing people with your car.
I don't disagree with you -- I'd only add that I think a major factor here is premeditation.
The law already treats harms from negligence or even from "heat of the moment" actions differently than harms from premeditated action.
Few of the vehicular deaths here are the result of a person making a particular decision to kill someone -- even if that is a statistically likelier outcome of distracted driving. That stands in contrast with shoplifting and vehicle theft, which are almost always planned actions, or at least actions undertaken with the knowledge that they are crimes.
Whether this is the right line to draw or not is, of course, a major question.
Relying on the driver to have some kind of moral anguish the rest of his life as punishment is shaky at best.
The driver might not even give a fuck. He might rationalize he wasn’t a fault.
What about the anguish it would cause a parent to know their child and their whole family were killed off and the driver gets to pretty much live his life as normal? Would you just accept that?
I am not suggesting anything of the sort. The family should absolutely sue the driver for everything he's got, an avenue available beyond the paltry criminal penalties applied here.
Of course, that will not make the family whole. Additional punishment for the driver will also not make the family whole.
The question is: what are our priorities as a society? This article is arguing that our priorities are terrible: as a society we create the conditions that allow and perpetuate this kind of tragedy on a daily basis, and then point fingers at the individuals when the tragedies inevitably happen.
We can't do anything to make this family whole. Advocating for greater punishment will do approximately nothing to make the next family whole.
This article is arguing: all we can do to make the next family whole is to stop treating traffic fatalities as unavoidable, and prevent the next tragedy by treating cars as the dangerous objects they really are, by supporting alternative modes of transportation.
He basically wants to keep repeating the virtue signalling idea that all people are good and punishment is bad.
He thinks you can cure bad actions by restricting freedom of actions in the first place. It's pretty sad and unfortunately terrible. But it is definitely "easier to feel good" with it.
Oof. You two seem to be arguing that you can cure bad actions with punishment, an idea that’s been debated ad nauseum for pretty much the entire recorded history of humanity. It’s fine, it provides a mild disincentive, in some cases it works a bit, but it overwhelmingly doesn’t solve the problems discussed in this thread: mistakes people make, sometimes innocently, and sometimes because of lapses of judgment. You can’t punish your way into better judgment, people will continue to make mistakes. We’re not talking about crimes with intent here. We’re talking about screwups that killed people.
The approach that works is to fix systems so that mistakes are harder to make or their consequences are mitigated. This is sometimes called defense in depth: many overlapping protections mean that accidents are less likely. Extra defenses mean that when mistakes do happen their consequences are less severe. (None of this has anything to do with whether you punish people who act maliciously, and is actually independent of whether you also do that.)
The FAA is a good example: mandated redundancies, the NTSB does a root cause analysis on every accident to figure out how it made it through defenses. As a result flying is one of the safest modes of transport, even despite Boeing’s recent attempts to undo that legacy.
For the cases in question here, roads could be redesigned to reduce the likelihood and severity of vehicles impacting pedestrians. In another message in this thread I listed eight possible measures society could take to do this.
Honestly it’s starting to feel like it’s the “more punishment!” crowd that’s virtue signaling at this point. Of course it’s easier to feel like you’ve solved the problem when you punish any person you can point a finger at, it’s much harder actually getting to the root of anything.
>You two seem to be arguing that you can cure bad actions with punishment, an idea that’s been debated ad nauseum for pretty much the entire recorded history of humanity.
It's not debated nor under debate, it's worked for that long. Not only has it worked that long but the effects are not even minor... otherwise it would have disappeared as it's pretty hard to maintain.
The punishment isn’t about corrective action, it’s about justice. If you kill off a whole family being a reckless idiot, you should not be able to just go on living your own life happily ever after. You should be rotting in prison without being able to live your own life. Both sides of the tragedy should be balanced out.
Yes, and neither this article nor I are advocating against justice being served. We are just making the point that this kind of justice alone doesn’t prevent future tragedies.
We can have justice, and we should, and then we should also feel a moral obligation to reduce harm from reckless or mistaken action in the future, no?
If we only have “justice” in the sense of punishment for harm, but do nothing to reduce the chances that we end up needing “justice” again later, then we’re just setting ourselves up for more future “justice” in the form of multiple destroyed lives: some through negligence, some through state action pursuing justice. Who does that serve?
I (and the original article) are advocating that we do more to reduce the likelihood that “being a reckless idiot” causes a whole family to be killed, because “justice” doesn’t prevent people from “being a reckless idiot” — and I for one would vastly prefer that my whole family not be killed, even if I knew that killer would be brought to justice.
I proposed 8 things we can do in the message you originally replied to.
It's statistically very unlikely that this driver will accidentally kill someone else. Keeping this driver locked up behind bars may be a reasonable punishment, but it doesn't change the stats one iota, and it doesn't prevent others from doing the same thing. That's why we also need systemic interventions like the 8 I listed earlier.
> the driver will have to deal with the knowledge that they killed an entire family by accident
Do you think the term "accident" accurately describes what happened? In that particular case, the driver of an SUV was speeding on the wrong side of the road, ran onto the sidewalk, and struck the family and the neighboring library.
In the sense that the outcome was not maliciously intentional, yes. Doesn’t mean they bear no responsibility, of course, or that their egregious actions didn’t cause it—just means they didn’t set out to do it.
> Even if consequences don’t bring people back from the dead, they are still useful for signaling to society that we recognize the severity of what happened.
Punishment shouldn't be used as a signal to the rest of society to show that an event was serious, there are ways to do that without ruining (more) lives.
I honestly can't think of a good reason to punish anyone in the US legal system as it has nothing to do with recovery or change for the individual. Laws and punishment should reflect the will and concerns of society though, not the other way around.
The driver, if not a complete sociopath, will be haunted by it for the rest of his/her life. Likely also bankrupt from a civil wrongful death lawsuit by the next of kin. I'm not sure what a jail sentence would do on top of that.
It’s depressing to think about their home where they spent their days together now just sitting silent and empty, one day they all left together and would never return again, everything exactly as they left it, soon to be emptied out and sold off to the next owners who will take over as if nothing happened. And apparently as far as society is concerned nothing did happen. Our lives really don’t mean shit to anyone but ourselves. Why are we like this?