The first-ever Uber safety report has an unconcealed associate degree ominous variety of great and fatal incidents in 2018. These embody 9 murders, fifty-eight folks killed in crashes, and 3,045 folks sexually molested.
The big apple Times says that the numbers are tough to place into a purposeful perspective because of the terribly high volume of rides and a scarcity of comparable knowledge.
The number of incidents depicted a fraction — simply zero.0002 % — of Uber’s one.3 billion rides within us last year, the corporate aforementioned.
There are few comparable figures to gauge Uber’s safety record against. The big apple department of local government, that keeps a register of sex crimes and rapes that occur on transit systems, counted 533 in 2018.
Some of the stats have an effect on drivers and riders roughly equally.
In cases of rape, Uber said, ninety-two % of the rumored victims were riders. however, drivers rumored alternative kinds of sexual assaults at the roughly identical rates as riders, Uber aforementioned.
Uber disclosed ten murders in 2017 and 9 in 2018. Seven victims were drivers, eight were passengers, and 4 were third parties, like bystanders outside the Uber vehicles, the corporate aforementioned.
The company admitted that the Uber safety report makes for robust reading, however, it says that the incidents mirror the planet during which we have a tendency to live instead of something specific to Uber.
Even one in every of Uber’s prime executives aforementioned the company’s findings were tough to the abdomen.
“The numbers are jarring and laborious to digest,” Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer, aforementioned in associate degree interview. “What it says is that Uber could be a reflection of the society it serves.”
Uber has stepped up its checks on drivers over time, it aforementioned and guarantees to try and do a lot of.
Uber has unrolled automatic technology to frequently check drivers’ driving records and criminal history. Since 2018, it said, it’s deactivated forty,000 drivers within us when they unsuccessful the checks created by the automatic technology.
The company has tripled the scale of its safety team since 2017, to three hundred staff, and plans to continue increasing it. Next year, it plans to line up a support hotline in partnership with the Rape, Abuse and criminal congress National Network, a non-profit-making that works against sexual violence.
Mr. West aforementioned Uber would additionally share info with alternative ride-hailing firms concerning drivers it thinks have committed associate degree assault, tho’ he failed to gift a timeline for doing this.
Audio and video recordings of rides could also be a key a part of the answer, tho’ this has raised privacy considerations.
