Uber Says 3,045 Sexual Assaults Were Reported in the U.S. trips in the Past year
SAN FRANCISCO — Uber said Thursday that it had killed reports of 3,045 sexual assault during his trips to the United States in the year 2018, with nine people, and 58 killed, crashes in his first study, in detail unsafe incidents on the ride-hailing platform.
The number of incidents, which represent only a fraction — just 0.0002 percent of the 1.3 billion trips in the United States in the past year, the company said.
There are few comparable figures to judge About the safety. The New York Police Department, which keeps a register of sexual crimes and rapes that occur on the transit systems, counted 533 in the year 2018.
But also one of Uber’s top executives, the company said the results were only stomach hard to come by.
“said, The numbers are staggering and hard to digest,” Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer, in an interview. “What he said is that Uber is a mirror image of the society that it serves.”
safety is a perennial Achilles’ heel for ride-hailing companies, which depend on a large amount of people with your service. To be Uber, the world’s largest, is chosen to be transparent about the cataloging of sexual assault, murders and crash-related deaths that has faced as it grows, the pressure on these issues.
Many of the ride-hailing company initially prospered due to disregard of rules and almost everyone with a car to a driver, without the screening and the required licences in the taxi industry. Reports of sexual assaults and murders are now commonplace, such as ride-hailing has become Central to a mainstay of urban transport. Many of the companies are with an increasing number of complaints about security incidents.
In 2017, a woman who was raped by her Uber driver in India, the company and its executives for the receipt of and the abuse of her medical records sued; they settled later for an undisclosed sum. This week, 19 women filed a lawsuit against Lyft, which is to say that they had been sexually harassed joined, while the rides on the initiative of the company.
Uber and others have introduced more safety features and procedures in recent years. Uber has rolled out automated technology to check regularly, – the driver ” driving records and criminal records. Since 2018, it said, it’s around 40,000 driver has been disabled in the United States, after you have failed the inspections through the automated technology.
Lyft is “to share the release of our own safety, transparency report and work conditions within the industry, information about drivers that don’t pass our initial or ongoing background checks, or disabled are required from our platform,” a company spokeswoman Alexandra LaManna, said on Thursday.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said ride-hailing company needs to focus more on safety, how to conduct fingerprint-based background checks of the drivers.
“All of these steps are starter, because this ride-hailing companies have been abjectly fail in their duty to protect against robbers or criminals,” he said.
Uber and Lyft are struggling financially. This year, the two companies prominent initial public stock offerings, which went on to The report does not give a comprehensive picture of the security landscape on the operations. If there is no information on the 65 countries outside the United States, where Uber offers its services.
In Brazil, India, and elsewhere, murders and robberies, the ride-hailing services have been widely reported. Didi Chuxing suspended some of its services in China and fired executives raped in the past year, after a female passenger and killed.
more About the study provides a benchmark for safety in an industry where such data was scarce.
The report deals with the safety of riders and drivers. Murder-victims were drivers, passengers, and third parties. In cases of rape, Uber said, 92 percent of the victims were drivers. But drivers report other types of sexual assault at about the same rate as the driver, Uber said.
The company was not specific about who the perpetrators were.
Uber said it had catalogued 2,936 sexual assault in the year 2017, and 3,045 in the year of 2018, up from the unwanted kiss, to what she called a “non-sexual part of the body” to the attempted rape and rape. The largest category was nonconsensual contact of a “sexual body part”, as someone on the mouth or genitals.
travel, The number of fatal crashes, Uber, was 49 in 2017 and 58 in the year 2018. The statistics also include accidents outside on the vehicles, as if she was a passenger, hit you at the end of the journey and crashes into the Uber driver not at fault.
Uber open 10 murders in 2017 and nine in the year 2018, the placed. Seven of the victims were drivers were the third eight passengers and four as spectators, outside of the Uber, the vehicles, the company said.
in the course of his study on stressed that 99.9 percent of your trips were safe and that it is taking an unusual step by releasing the data in the first place. Sexual violence-the experts were agreed that the publication of the figures was an important step in the fight against abuse in the industry as a whole.
” That a company is ready to pull the curtains and let us examine what is happens, for me, the success,” said Cindy Southworth, the executive vice president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence and a member of the safety advisory board.
Uber began studying the issue of sexual violence in late 2017 under its newly recruited chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi. He recruits Mr. West, a former justice Department official, to the company and asked to check cases of sexual harassment and violence under over-rides this year.
Over the next 21 months, Uber trained his staff to filter reports from riders and drivers in the world in 21 categories, such as nonconsensual sexual penetration, squint and unwelcome comments about the appearance of a person. The company also collaborated with security organizations such as the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.
Uber narrows, ultimately, the scope of the report to five categories and focused on the United States.
Jeanne Christensen, a partner at the Wigdor law firm, who has said rape victims to be represented in lawsuits against Uber, the publication of the data would create incentives to improve About your safety.
“the more the public is aware of, the more the company and each other has to react,” she said. “It’s like a part of everyday life, each goes to take it. We are already at this point. So now you are only to make it as safe as possible.”
Mr. West said Uber had more to do. The company has expand tripled the size of the security team for the year 2017, with 300 employees and plans to continue. In the next year, the establishment of a support hotline, in cooperation with the rape, abuse and incest National network plans, a non-profit, which works against sexual violence.
Mr. West, said Uber also share information with other ride-hailing companies to drivers that it thinks would be an attack not have committed, although he will present a timeline for it.
“There is no law, regulation or court process, the forces to make this data available,” he said. “We do this, to be honest, because the public has a right to know.”
Released on Fri, 06 Dec 2019 09:40:39 +0000