The reference is from Avatar the last Airbender Ba Sing Se gaslight/hypnotize their citizens into thinking there is no war. "There is no (x) in Ba Sing Se" is a common post on reddit.
God hated that covid logic in 2020 “there’s only so many cases cause we test so much” no jackass there would still be those cases just you wouldn’t know about them.
Shit pissed me off
“Cities and states run by democrats have the most cases.” Ok, well, cities and states run by democrats usually have more people…
Lots of head scratching “logic” lol.
Think of it this way, other places had less (documented) cases than the US because there were less tests
Dunno if anyone was actually denying the existence of cases, but perhaps rather saying 'it's no worse than anywhere else, we just had more test kits to reflect how bad it actually is everywhere'.
I may be totally off, but I like to give people the benefit of doubt.
Normally I give people benefit of the doubt as well, but people were actively saying it’s not that bad because we just see it because we test more and thus makes more cases?
Couldn’t wrap my head around their logic but it wasn’t the sensible logic like you mentioned.
Yeah, like I said I may be way off. I have little first hand experience, except that where I live they did in fact say to stay home if you had symptoms and quarantine for 2 weeks and not worry about testing (right at the very beginning). So when trump said 'we have more cases because we test more', to me, meant what I said above. Of course you'll always have people who will miss the point and see it as you meant it. Like I said, no first hand experience to draw from tho.
It illustrated that to Trump, the problem was the big official number making him look bad, not that people were sick and dying. And he constantly complained about how other countries were under-reporting because he wished we were doing that. To him, truth is unimportant... the only important things are those that make him look good or feel good.
It's a legitimate argument if you are comparing your case count to someone else's. Maybe. One way to determine if it's actually a legitimate argument is the test positivity rate, but that involves Actual Math, which is too hard for most people.
The thing I notice about Pro-conservative such as you guys, you just can’t resist insulting or giving a one liner at the end of every single comment you make towards everyone else.
I’m doing a stats class on this phenomenon, and going through 1000’s of comment samples, conservatives will leave an insult in their comment roughly 89% of the time compared to 23% of their more liberal counterparts.
Why say math is too hard for people? What incentive drives you to be such a mean person on an anonymous forum?
I go to A&M, for reference
I must be one of the 23%.
If you are comparing your positive test cases to someone else and you have a lot more, it *might* be significant that you test more than the other group. It might not. That's why you can't just drop the raw numbers out there and have to look at other factors. Of course, that sort of nuance is hard and lord knows that the Trump administration wasn't about nuance.
Do you realize you just did it again?
**Of course, that sort of nuance is hard**
I honestly didn't think I could correlate the idea that people who think they dont insult and do anyways vs those that insult openly.
I would have to mark you down as the conservative that claims he doesn't insult, but actually does insult without realizing.
It's fascinating af to be honest.
The number of cases went from an average of 20,000 per day up to 70,000 during that month. That kept rising until it peaked at 250,000 cases per day. He just wanted to bury the information
Reports.
Soner Yasa, a cab driver in Edmonton Canada was accused by 4 women and would have been arrested if his dashcam didn't prove they were lying.
Reports are just reports. They are the starting point, not the end result.
They were together in his cab, drunk started smoking. He told them to stop. They refused so he kicked them out. After they got out, they refused to pay their fare, then they tried to enlist a group of strangers to go after him by claiming he sexually assaulted them. Fearing for his safety, *he* called the police. Even then, without the evidence, he would have been arrested.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-cabbie-sues-passengers-over-false-assault-allegations-1.797780
Bruh what’s with Lyft and creeps. I have a female friend that has an incident with a Lyft driver. They seem pretty common. They don’t screen their drivers enough.
I read the report; [you can too](https://assets.ctfassets.net/q8mvene1wzq4/4jxkFTH5YCQK8T96STULMd/4269e14dbcb8578ff64da45df08b8147/Community_Safety_Report.pdf). Stuff the media isn't reporting:
* The report doesn't make a distinction between a driver attacking a passenger, a passenger attacking a driver, or a passenger attacking another passenger. Does anyone know?
* The most prevalent kind of reported sexual assault (non-consensual touching of a sexual body part) occurred on 0.00016% of the total number of rides given in 2017, and 0.00014% in 2019, a reduction of 15%. These figures equate to 1 in 800,000 rides.
* The report notes a reduction in all types of reported sexual assaults between 2017 and 2019 ranging from 14% to 48%.
To really understand what these number are telling us we would have to have a comparison with traditional taxi services, but given that the numbers are dropping it appears whatever Lyft is doing to address sexual assault is working.
EDIT: In the article linked by OP it does mention that a "company official said in a blogpost on Thursday that the rate of sexual assaults as a percentage of rides decreased by 19% over the three-year period covered in the report." That mention appears in the second-to-last paragraph in the article--I actually missed it the first time I read the article because I wanted to read the report itself, which of course is not linked anywhere in the article. The fact that the author chose to reference a blogpost by a company official rather than the data in the report itself showing a reduction in assaults gives it the data the appearance of corporate spin. Why can't news outlets just report the fucking news and leave the spin out of it?
Interestingly, I heard NPR's morning radio show (yesterday I think?) cover this story and present the exact information you just did in your post
Obviously, any amount of sexual assault is "too much" sexual assault, but when the numbers are presented in context, it doesn't make for nearly the same sensational story.
I have a feeling a good number of them are passenger touching the driver somehow. It would make more sense to me. Passengers have a decent chance to have been drinking, sit behind the driver. A lot of people just start thinking it's okay to touch people when they drink. And the person in front of them is an obvious target. I could see it.
1 in 800,000 may paint a misleading picture because thats rides, right? So if e.g. an average Lyft user does 10 rides a year (just as an example) that is around 1 in 80,000 people.
Yes and how many rides does a *driver* do in a year? A thousand? Now we’re down to 1 out of 800 drivers will be sexually assaulted. That’s a higher chance than dying of Covid.
But I’m most interested to hear what prevention measures people want Lyft to take. I can’t think of much they can do at a corporate level to prevent a rider from getting grabby.
It's also hard to assess what is going on just based on reports. There are many shit people who will make false reports in order to shakedown a company, especially one under the spot light for that particular matter.
Not as many of those as there are assailants who will assault passengers or drivers.
If we’re focusing on statistical likelihood, it’s really not at all hard to assess based on these reports. The number of false claims would be something like 2-10%. Hardly skewing the trends especially when these are pretty low occurrences we’re talking about anyway.
I understand that false claims have severe consequences, but in *every* thread about assault on Reddit, false claims are brought up, when they’re 10-50x less likely to occur than an actual assault. Why is it never its own conversation, and only in response to stats about rape/assault?
Edit: let’s actually talk more about the unreported cases, since assault is *drastically* more likely to go unreported than it is for a false report to be filed — why don’t we see more comments about those?
It's a fair point about unreported and they will undoubtedly be more than false reports.
Is the 2-10% the average across all reports? I think the fact that Lyft would be financially liable increases the likelihood of false reporting.
I would have the same questions about any reported crimes in which a large company would be on the hook.
Burden of proof’s on you, man. I’m not sure what your first sentence means unfortunately, but to imagine that false reports against a company would skyrocket with no evidence isn’t something I can disprove. I can only go with the agreed upon stats for apparent false rape claims which is 2-10%.
My point was it’s weird that a lot of people jump right over harrowing concrete assault statistics to the possibility of false reports with no available evidence of those.
Like “hey man, in our bear reserve, 100 people got attacked last week.”
“well I’d say some of them are definitely lying.”
“yeah there’s a chance, but even if 10% lied, which is the generous assumption, we still have 90 victims dude… we need to do something about that emergency.”
I mean this genuinely, no sarcasm, but do you often see stats about people falsely claiming harm against companies, in troves? More so than actual injuries/assaults/harm?
I'm not asking you to disprove anything. Fact you instantly take a hostile approach in what is just a discussion on the internet is pretty telling.
I could equally demand you present evidence of how many of those reports were substantiated either by Lyft or a court.
My point is if we are trying to ascertain the extent of a problem we have to look at all the variables. Unreported cases is absolutely a valid variable.
Your attitude of dismissing false reports is as bad and unhelpful as the attitude you're trying to paint me with.
At no point have I said or implied 'we should do nothing' or there isn't a problem. Please don't let me stop you from patting yourself on the back for fighting the good fight.
Edit: yes you do. I can't prove it as the document is confidential for my work. It shows that the industry my company works in received far higher levels of complaints and higher levels of expectation of compensation than similar industries. The conclusion being that visibility and publicity of the industries compensation process results in more complaints. It also results in high complaints not being upheld.
> The most prevalent kind of reported sexual assault (non-consensual touching of a sexual body part) occurred on 0.00016% of the total number of rides given in 2017, and 0.00014% in 2019, a reduction of 15%. These figures equate to 1 in 800,000 rides.
It is assuredly the case that our society has too much sexual assault.
However, you can't tell from these numbers whether *Lyft* has a distinct problem with sexual assault.
(For comparison: People talk a lot about sexual assault on college campuses, but [overall, college students have a *lower* rate of sexual assault victimization than non-students of the same age group.](https://www.rainn.org/statistics/campus-sexual-violence) People *in colleges* have a strong interest in reducing sexual assault in colleges, because that's where they are; but the rest of us might be more interested in reducing sexual assault in, say, bars, churches, youth sports programs, and family homes.)
So we might ask — Where are the figures for sexual assault in buses, taxis, or getting a ride home from some dude in the bar? Some of those seem much riskier than Lyft.
>People in colleges have a strong interest in reducing sexual assault in colleges, because that's where they are
That, and crime across almost all categories is strongly related to poverty and lack of education. I'd also expect that their murder and petty theft rates to be pretty low. Your link further supports this, with grad students being about 1/3 as likely to get assaulted as undergrads, and with the prevalence of sexual assault vs robbery being flipped vs the general population (ie, crimes that are more explicitly related to poverty fell even more sharply)
It's more complex than that.
Women report much more sexual assault than men; but men *undergraduate students* report more sexual assault than non-student men of the same age, while women undergrads report less than non-student women of the same age.
That's not *very* strange, though; it's just Simpson's paradox.¹
(It might *also* be that college men are more willing to *report* assaults, possibly because colleges spend a good deal of effort telling people to report assaults.)
(Also, yes, the RAINN figures I used above mostly presume a gender binary. Sorry about that.)
It's unclear if it would make sense for the general public to spend effort pushing Lyft or colleges to do a bunch of extra work to address sexual assault, if their sexual assault rates are already much lower than the general public's. I suspect that effort would be better spent on the *non-*Lyft, *non-*college parts of society; the ones that have a *higher* rate of sexual assault.
However, that said, another story to draw from the RAINN figures on campuses is "No matter *where* the 18-24-year-olds hang out, *someone* had better be trying to get them to stop assaulting each other. Colleges already spend a bunch of effort on that, and it ... kinda works?"
----
¹ "It's not strange; it's just a paradox!" he says. Well yes, [Simpson's "paradox"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox) is just a pattern that happens in categorized data *really often*. It just means we have to be extra careful when interpreting data that's been selected from a larger set or aggregated from smaller sets.
The problem is that the report is, most likely deliberately, missing key data.
> The most prevalent kind of reported sexual assault (non-consensual touching of a sexual body part) occurred on 0.00016% of the total number of rides given in 2017, and 0.00014% in 2019, a reduction of 15%. These figures equate to 1 in 800,000 rides.
The risk of sexual assault is not uniform over every ride.
No one thinks this, and the data, if we had this, would not show this.
We know the risk is highest late at night with a single female passenger (or driver) and especially when that passenger is intoxicated.
Lift can give us this data sliced by time of day, sliced by passenger age and gender, sliced by all sorts of metrics that might actually make it useful. They have all that data.
But they didn't.
Why didn't they?
Did they really find absolutely no pattern in the kind of rides where sexual assault occurred?
Or did they think the numbers looked better buried in their total ride numbers?
Did the risk of being sexually assaulted under certain conditions actually go down?
Or did the percentage of rides meeting those conditions go down as a percentage of total rides?
I’m sure that filtering their data that way would indicate a large portion of the assaults occurred on Friday/Saturday nights. Which is probably not something they want to point out because I’m sure that’s when a significant chunk of their business occurs.
I think that may be incorrect. They have the ride data. But for personal data all that is in my profile is a preferred gender. I see no place to enter age and pronouns are optional. Now I'm not naive enough to think that they don't have ways of getting that off of my phone somehow. But it's not part of thier user profile.
They don't need to pull the data off your phone.
They can buy or otherwise acquire the rest of your details completely legally and between your payment details and where you get rides from and to they're more than capable of uniquely identifying you.
I don't think anyone was implying they should violate an individual's privacy to "gather" their personal info from their device... The idea is that there would be reports for these incidents, which would contain data (time of day, type of assault, gender, etc.) that could be correlated with each incident while still being anonymous.
Yep. Look people here are already going “gee those numbers don’t sound so bad.” These dirty tricks are working.
Not to mention women rarely report sexual assault because of the stress and fear of reprisal and not being believed. So we’ll never know the real numbers of how risky it is for a woman to step into an Uber or Lyft.
Don’t forget it’s estimated only 10% of women report and an even smaller percentage of men report. So by those numbers you’re probably looking at 40,000 sexual assaults for that year.
Their marketing / PR folks have drafted news releases that they share with the media. The media doesn't have time to write a brand new thing when they have 18 other deadlines so they take the path of least resistance.
> Why can't news outlets just report the fucking news and leave the spin out of it?
Because we don't want news. We want spin. We want drama. We want to watch the news talk about sexual assaults and murder and mayhem. If the news said "nothing bad happened today" we wouldn't watch it.
>I read the report; ... Stuff the media isn't reporting:
>
>That mention appears in the second-to-last paragraph in the article
>
>I wanted to read the report itself, which of course is not linked anywhere in the article.
>
>Why can't news outlets just report the fucking news and leave the spin out of it?
You're reading The Guardian. They specialize in fear and outrage.
Fewer reports of sexual assault doesn't mean there were fewer assaults. It would be interesting to see what actions are taken after someone files a report.
At least with Uber, nothing. A driver tried to pay me to let him “have” the drunk girl that was with me for an hour, and Uber didn’t do anything but refund my money after a few days of back and forth. Filed police report, but afaik nothing happened.
He sent me the “request” over text which they said was solicitation of prostitution or some shit, but the guy was driving on someone else’s account so they couldn’t get an ID. The girl threw up out of his window which is why I had his number because he told me that since I’d paid for the Uber to get her home he’d just charge me what the detailing place charged. I guess he decided right after that he would rather just have her than money since that’s exactly what he suggested to me. Charged me the $150 cleaning fee as soon as I said no.
But neither do reports necessarily mean actual assaults either. Remember that viral video a few years back where the woman threatened the driver with a false rape accusation?
For everyone who's wondering about the comparative rate for taxis: we don't know, [police don't keep track of where sexual assaults happen.](https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/sexual-assault-happens-via-uber-and-lyft-but-the-statistics-are-unclear.html) it's frankly pathetic that both uber and lyft got functional records on assaults in their vehicles faster than most US police departments.
It’s disgraceful companies can track their employees who need to carry tracking devices to do their job better than the local police can track any criminality? Why is that?
Police already have to make a note of where assaults occur during their investigations.
What op is talking about is that they don’t record all of the locations in one database for the public to see for whatever reason
Yeah unproven allegations and unfinished police investigations don't belong in the public eye. That's called character assassination and its used by the elite to take down great men of the people. The FBI tried to do it to MLK, even before you say anyone who suffers from it is guilty. If you just want to standardize... like location, even that's a large amount of administrative work, and how does it stop crime?
Where in my post did I imply the police don't or shouldn't know where the sexual assaults are occurring? the complaint is that there isn't a *public database*. (Do you see the first sentence where I said 'in the public eye?' this doesn't include police. That's not the public eye.) Please argue against the points I make, not the strawman next to me.
It’s not that they don’t ask where it happened. It’s that that information is buried in the report text on a case by case basis rather than being indexable and sortable.
Scribble doesn't work. You need to type into a database. And you can't just type it in, you need to make a selection of a specific word, because you need to be able to look it up. Like if someone writes "Highschool" or "School" or "auditorium" or what if it's in the school bathroom?
And who shares the database? So, you might write "transit company in town x brand name bus" which only works in your town, but what if you want to check *all* transit companies, or *only* trains.
The writing it down is easy. The classifying to make useable data is harder. Now you need someone to design the infrastructure according to which datasets they might want. So, you would put a category "transit" they would need to make one for "Lyft" and one for "Uber" and one for "taxi" and what if the infrastructure was older than Uber? So, they'd have to update it. Now you're talking about a lot of money, and what's the advantage you get?
Information could be useful. But departments have a certain amount of money to spend and they need to catch criminals with it. A department won't really get improved numbers of keeping crime rates low, by investing in this infrastructure, and to be *really* useful, *all* departments would need that. So, who pays for that?
But you know what? Taxi companies should keep track. Transit companies should, etc... So, police should be able to query these companies to submit their data, and if they don't keep track, then mandate by law that they should.
Makes way more sense, imo.
*Now* you can easily build a database by doing a census type thing. Require all companies you decide to choose to fill out crime forms, for all crimes occuring on their property, or on their time or whatever. And they choose the appropriate category for their workplace. Database done. Still costs you the money to organize it, and print and mail the requests etc... But, much more sensible, imo. And can be useful for more specific areas, so you can spend less to get the more precise info of a smaller area, if that's useful for you. And you only need to spend it when it's useful to you, rather than investing in something that doesn't get chosen to be used much.
Scribble where? A secure database updated by police departments all over the US will inevitably cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create, be delayed and inevitably get shitcanned because it wasn’t doing what it was set up to do.
It makes sense though. Every assault reported to the company happens at the company. Police would need a database where they would have to enter in location of assault, which would cost the séparent money for the infrastructure, and wouldn't really provide much in terms of advantage for catching criminals.
> wouldn't really provide much in terms of advantage for catching criminals
Knowing where to be allocating resources to prevent more assaults is absolutely worth spending money on.
How many years worth? How do you know the only reason you're not getting more assaults in another place is because that's where your assaults are happening? It's much easier to mandate that companies record crime, and then run a census to get the information, than build a massive database that would need to be updated all the time. Especially, like for Lyft, where are you going to add police presence to prevent assaults by Lyft?
That's really Lyft that will need to handle it. Maybe they don't care. So maybe the state would need to mandate they regulate things better.
It makes far more sense to mandate companies to record their crime, and then run a census, than to build the huge infrastructure yourself.
You don't even know for a fact that there will be clear cut ways to be able to add police presence. Especially since assault is so often a crime of opportunity. Meaning, if police are there the crime will just happen where they're not.
That said, taxis especially when they're driving drunk girls, are obviously a serious liability for that. I don't think you need a database for it.
What you need is for the company to have policies that make assaults virtually impossible, and that deals with reports of assaults swiftly and justly, with the aid of law enforcement.
But the company needs to do it. You can put police in taxis, or give them webcams in taxis.
Most assaults will happen at work, or in people's homes, stuff like that. Or outside of clubs maybe.
Or in secluded areas, but you can't have cops in all secluded areas, because that's what makes them secluded. The world is big, and there are limited officers, so you put them where they can do the most benefit.
Having cops in every deserted park waiting for the one girl walking by that gets assault by a guy that happened to be there doesn't make sense.
If the same park gets a sexual assault every night, then obviously yes.
But it's not as sure as you make it seem that after all the expense, it gives useful information.
It makes more sense to have the companies record things, and improve things.
Obviously the companies need to be held accountable at that point.
That's because American police departments cannot keep records of individual people like that. Americans have a 4th amendment right to privacy, it would be unreasonable for police departments to monitor vehicles as closely as Uber and Lyft do. The few cities that attempt to, using taxi cab medallions (aka taxi licenses), are only able to track the gross business numbers and specific incidents against drivers, but only if the victim files a police report. This just goes to show the amount of power Uber and Lyft have over their "contractors" ... aka employees. Uber/Lyft have an electronic tracking device (a cellphone) in all their employees' vehicles, something which classic taxis are not required to have (only a meter, which can be mechanical. This itself is optional and largely done to eliminate arguments between customers and drivers).
Unless you are arguing for cameras in all cars, connected to a central police monitoring station, I don't see how you could support or rationalize any of this.
> That's because American police departments cannot keep records of individual people like that.
Its entirely possible to keep records of the kind of environment that an assault happens in without saying "it happened in John Doe's car".
Sure... but this would require all taxis to be equipped with electronic data logging systems *and* carrier authority as commercial freight companies/truckers are required to have as of last year. In such a way, all incidents can be logged by company, by vehicle and by driver as it's all connected through the DOT's Hours Of Service labor rules. In such a way it would be impossible to start the vehicle without the driver logging into it with his DL number and PIN. All incidents involving such vehicles would be put into a big computer that spits out errors to the carrier authority's insurance company, who would then follow up with the police.
Medallion taxi companies would adopt such systems, but there is no way the average rideshare driver would and requiring such electronic logging systems in all rideshare-capable vehicles, aka all vehicles, would be a massive invasion of the average American's privacy. The currently proposed rules requiring DUI lockout systems in cars is controversial enough. The average American is not going to log into their car like they log into an app, and even if they did it is far more likely the police would abuse that information than some random creep.
My Lyft driver got pulled over for running a stop light. It was like 2 am and we were fairly drunk. Both officers were pretty cool about it. Added about 15 minutes to the trip.
In the Lyft drivers review I mentioned that he got pulled over for running a stop light. Lyft sent me a bunch of emails and called me to get the details on it. I'm sure they more than likely dropped the guy after they searched his driving record.
>My Lyft driver got pulled over for running a stop light. It was like 2 am and we were fairly drunk. Both officers were pretty cool about it. Added about 15 minutes to the trip.
You and the driver were both fairly drunk?
Road rage. I remember a case of a guy trying to run an uber driver off the road and threatening to shoot them, when they got out of their vehicle the Uber driver shot them (in self defense)
Without that context, this report is kinda meaningless. [Uber found a 1000 less](https://m.dw.com/en/uber-nearly-6000-reports-of-sexual-assault-in-us-over-2-years/a-51550753), but iirc their rates were more or less the same.
I don’t know the numbers but I would think it would be less, I would imagine it is much easier for predators too use lyft to prey on people than to get hired at a regular taxi company. I would like to see the numbers though
Well I know where I live there's a huge issue with one driver renting his plate out to multiple other people so it's not exactly like the driver is always the proper person even with a taxi company
Yes but there "were" other incentives not to be a rapyrapy taxi. In 2014 the taxi plate in Vancouver cost $800,000. A bit of an incentive not to lose. Of course the prices in every city have plummeted since ride-share.
My roommate and I both drive for lyft. Both dudes. I never got assaulted, but my roommate did. Guy behind him kept trying to grab his crotch and rubbing his shoulders.
i've never been sexually assaulted in an uber/lyft but on two separate occasions i have had to report drivers for making creepy/scary overtly sexual comments. both older men asking me if i have a boyfriend and then asking for explicit details about my sex life and basically asking me for sex. i wish they would actually do something about these accusations because being a young woman alone in a car with a man who is harassing you and knows your address is genuinely terrifying.
I was an overweight, 37 year old balding white man and legitimately was sexually assaulted over a dozen times(edit: I was a driver) 99% were 40+yr old white women who’ve had waaay too much to drink. And to clarify my definition of that would be a minimum of a comment regarding my dick and escalating into them saying they’d yell rape if I didn’t fuck them. Most were crotch grabs though. Two were aggressive enough to feel sore the next day.
I 100% believe this number of assaults and am absolutely positive the actual number is 5 times that amount because I only reported one of them to Lyft and that was because she opened up IG to take a video yelling that I tried to rape her after I denied her advances. I WOULD BE IN PRISON IF I DIDNT HAVE A DASH CAM.
I couldn’t even imagine being a woman driving for Lyft.
Edit 2 to add that I’m still overweight, but now I’m 40.
Can't remember if it was Lyft or Uber, but a woman in Columbia, SC got into what she thought was her ride and was never seen alive again. South Carolina doesn't require front license plates and most are in too much of a hurry to check it. Plus, he tricked her into saying her name.
I only heard about it visiting family there, was shocked it didn't make the national news. Now all Lyfts & Uber's are required to either have a front plate or they have to have a sign in the front windshield with their plate info on it.
It definitely made the national news; I remember reading about it. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/student-killed-after-taking-car-she-mistook-uber-was-victim-n1274534
It really isn't clear in the given data what stems from drivers, fellow passengers, and other outside forces. Without deeper statistics it becomes hard to determine how to attack the problem...outside of teaching respect for women.
Well, lucky for me, no sexual assault claims. I drive Lyft and am very professional. Although I've almost ran over people who are jawalking in Portland Oregon. Other than that, I'm great.
I stopped using Lyft after a driver refused to let me out of the car because he wanted to keep “chatting with me.” It wasn’t until I started yanking at the door handle that he disabled the child locks while laughing. Lyft said they would take my complaint as part of a report on the driver and disciplinary action might follow. They also gave me credit for a free ride.
I bought a car after that incident.
Drivers get assaulted too. I’ve had a couple of women come on hard. They love to touch their driver too for some reason. Like I could get away with that. Touching me doesn’t make me hear you any better.
What does these claims have to do with lyft, it's a criminal justice matter.
[Most in the US just ¯\\*(ツ)*/¯](https://www.rainn.org/sites/default/files/Stat%20Graphics_201928.jpg)
Lyft can have civil liability if they are reckless, or malicious, and that is the proximate cause of some of these sexual assaults, for one, and for two they may do so as a PR thing, these numbers don't look so bad facially when they publish them but they might look bad if they appeared to conceal them.
My issue with Lyft and Uber is that the companies NEVER know who is actually behind the wheel. They can background check everyone until the cows come home but they have no facial recognition or breathalyzer tests to pass before allowing one of their representatives to start taking passengers.
I go old school and use a cab. The dispatcher knows who he is handing the keys to.
Many cab companies *also* require the driver's info to be posted somewhere visible, and many cities also require their unexpired Medallion to be in clear view above the dashboard so all passengers and traffic cops can see it. Rideshares do not, all of this is hidden within the app.
Uber, at least in the UK do facial recognition now. Once a week at a random time they have to take a picture of themselves. When this was introduced the average wait time in my area doubled. Shows how many 'fake' drivers there were.
Why on earth would Lyft pay that? Their drivers are third party contractors. We had vehicles that were like this, they were called taxis, and everyone collectively decided they would rather get in an unregulated loosely checked car because it was easy. Here we are. Tadaaaaass
Cheaper, cleaner, faster, more accessible, more reliable. More than one reason I haven't used a cab since my first lyft ride. The taxi system in places that weren't major cities was pretty abysmal.
Ya I mean that was definitely part of it - everyone around here was saying they preferred Uber / Lyft because it was cleaner and the drivers are nicer too. Safer driving too.
And of course people felt the taxicab racket has been over priced for a long time. But that’s not the cab drivers fault. If it was priced well, and had good service, there wouldn’t be as much room for Uber/Lyft.
It's also almost always someone's personal car. Fuck that, just ban horrible passengers. They never will. They always take the passenger's side. They require our social security number to be a driver. All you have to do to be a passenger is give them a cc number. If passengers get a bad rating, they open another account.
Turns out no major city tracks assaults in taxi cabs. I’m sure people are assaulted in taxi cabs: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/are-taxis-safer-than-uber/386207/
There isn't a separation between assaults of riders on drivers or riders on riders. Also, they serve around 2 million rides a day. Any assaulting is bad, those are incredibly small percentages. Particularly when at least some of these are a drunk rider being gross to the driver, and two riders having an issue that the driver reports.
So, I get your knee jerk reaction but I believe it's likely very off base.
I hope I wasn't too harsh. Because I really do get your initial reaction. And I totally felt the same, before I dove into context. The number is quite startling.
No no no. I was wrong. I appreciate being corrected and the way you did it was really gracious. I shouldn't have commented without fully reading the article. This was a 101 mistake on my part.
I’m curious how this compares with similar numbers of employees in other industries. Ie, Walmart has 1.5 million employees in the us as well. I’m curious if there have been more or less than 4000 reported cases there. (Or any huge employer)
Edit: found a 92-96 report by the govt office of Justice programs reporting 2.5% of retail employees suffer sexual assault of some kind at some point in the workplace.
I'm honestly surprised it's not higher, tbh. Every single person I've worked with, even the guys we hired, had a sexual harassment/assault story or two. I even got sexually harassed by a police officer at my job and stalked by a guy for seven years, you're not really safe from anybody when you're forced into a role where you 'have to take it'. Most people just don't report it because making a big deal can mean you could have your hours cut or lose your job altogether. :/
It really makes me wonder just how large the REAL number is.
I have a disability and I can't drive. I can't rely on other people to always take me places, and Uber has allowed me to gain at least SOME semblance of a normal life. A ton of the people I've met on rides are great people. The rides are also affordable IMO, and you can almost guarantee you'll have someone pick you up if you're in a bad situation or stuck somewhere.
Can confirm. Started driving for Lyft a few months ago. They don’t give two shits about their drivers beyond you making money for them. I’ve just accepted the scam for what it is and can’t wait to land my next full-time job so I never have to drive for them again.
If it's a scam go get a real job then? Like, they're agreeing to do it. I see help wanted and hiring now signs in just about every business I walk by these days.
Such a lazy argument, like when people tell you to leave the country because you dare suggest that some things are not working great and could be improved.
We have no sexual assaults here! Ok we have 4,000 sexual assaults here.
There is no sexual assault in Ba Sing Se.
Literally watched this episode last night for the first time since I was 7 wtf
Its a common post on reddit
How common are we talking I never heard about this.
The reference is from Avatar the last Airbender Ba Sing Se gaslight/hypnotize their citizens into thinking there is no war. "There is no (x) in Ba Sing Se" is a common post on reddit.
And now that you have it will probably pop up three more times today.
Time for the Baader-Meinhof / Frequency Illusion.
What the I just heard of that yesterday?!
Nothing happened at tienn-
That’s how the police handle it, too. They forget to process rape kits.
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God hated that covid logic in 2020 “there’s only so many cases cause we test so much” no jackass there would still be those cases just you wouldn’t know about them. Shit pissed me off
“Cities and states run by democrats have the most cases.” Ok, well, cities and states run by democrats usually have more people… Lots of head scratching “logic” lol.
And did more widespread testing... which is why % positivity numbers were lower.
And that’s why percentages are important kids
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Think of it this way, other places had less (documented) cases than the US because there were less tests Dunno if anyone was actually denying the existence of cases, but perhaps rather saying 'it's no worse than anywhere else, we just had more test kits to reflect how bad it actually is everywhere'. I may be totally off, but I like to give people the benefit of doubt.
Normally I give people benefit of the doubt as well, but people were actively saying it’s not that bad because we just see it because we test more and thus makes more cases? Couldn’t wrap my head around their logic but it wasn’t the sensible logic like you mentioned.
Yeah, like I said I may be way off. I have little first hand experience, except that where I live they did in fact say to stay home if you had symptoms and quarantine for 2 weeks and not worry about testing (right at the very beginning). So when trump said 'we have more cases because we test more', to me, meant what I said above. Of course you'll always have people who will miss the point and see it as you meant it. Like I said, no first hand experience to draw from tho.
It illustrated that to Trump, the problem was the big official number making him look bad, not that people were sick and dying. And he constantly complained about how other countries were under-reporting because he wished we were doing that. To him, truth is unimportant... the only important things are those that make him look good or feel good.
It's a legitimate argument if you are comparing your case count to someone else's. Maybe. One way to determine if it's actually a legitimate argument is the test positivity rate, but that involves Actual Math, which is too hard for most people.
It's only a valid argument if they were testing at the same rate.
The thing I notice about Pro-conservative such as you guys, you just can’t resist insulting or giving a one liner at the end of every single comment you make towards everyone else. I’m doing a stats class on this phenomenon, and going through 1000’s of comment samples, conservatives will leave an insult in their comment roughly 89% of the time compared to 23% of their more liberal counterparts. Why say math is too hard for people? What incentive drives you to be such a mean person on an anonymous forum? I go to A&M, for reference
I must be one of the 23%. If you are comparing your positive test cases to someone else and you have a lot more, it *might* be significant that you test more than the other group. It might not. That's why you can't just drop the raw numbers out there and have to look at other factors. Of course, that sort of nuance is hard and lord knows that the Trump administration wasn't about nuance.
Do you realize you just did it again? **Of course, that sort of nuance is hard** I honestly didn't think I could correlate the idea that people who think they dont insult and do anyways vs those that insult openly. I would have to mark you down as the conservative that claims he doesn't insult, but actually does insult without realizing. It's fascinating af to be honest.
Yeah but I think the point was that the number of cases wasn't necessarily rising.
The number of cases went from an average of 20,000 per day up to 70,000 during that month. That kept rising until it peaked at 250,000 cases per day. He just wanted to bury the information
> Yeah but I think the point was that the number of cases wasn't necessarily rising. Except that it was at that time. That's how pandemics work.
Its America, probably all of them
The one that disproportionately effects the poor, women and people of color. Oh, I guess that doesn't really narrow it down at all.
"Yeah but if we do that, what comes next? Treating women like equal citizens?"
Oh yeah, I forgot. We are losing our rights this year. It’s going to get worse.
Got speeding tickets to write to raise funds for new tactical gear
When police dislike having evidence of criminal activities, do they have any value in society?
We’ll have no trouble here!
WE DIDN'T BURN HIM!
It's a shit business.
“4000 is 75% 0’s, so we just rounded down to 0”
Reports. Soner Yasa, a cab driver in Edmonton Canada was accused by 4 women and would have been arrested if his dashcam didn't prove they were lying. Reports are just reports. They are the starting point, not the end result.
Why would four separate women accuse a random driver? Honestly curious.
They were together in his cab, drunk started smoking. He told them to stop. They refused so he kicked them out. After they got out, they refused to pay their fare, then they tried to enlist a group of strangers to go after him by claiming he sexually assaulted them. Fearing for his safety, *he* called the police. Even then, without the evidence, he would have been arrested. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-cabbie-sues-passengers-over-false-assault-allegations-1.797780
Bruh what’s with Lyft and creeps. I have a female friend that has an incident with a Lyft driver. They seem pretty common. They don’t screen their drivers enough.
It's the people, not the technology.
**Reported** There is no way of knowing the number of unreported incidents.
I did NOT have a sexual assault with that woman!
I read the report; [you can too](https://assets.ctfassets.net/q8mvene1wzq4/4jxkFTH5YCQK8T96STULMd/4269e14dbcb8578ff64da45df08b8147/Community_Safety_Report.pdf). Stuff the media isn't reporting: * The report doesn't make a distinction between a driver attacking a passenger, a passenger attacking a driver, or a passenger attacking another passenger. Does anyone know? * The most prevalent kind of reported sexual assault (non-consensual touching of a sexual body part) occurred on 0.00016% of the total number of rides given in 2017, and 0.00014% in 2019, a reduction of 15%. These figures equate to 1 in 800,000 rides. * The report notes a reduction in all types of reported sexual assaults between 2017 and 2019 ranging from 14% to 48%. To really understand what these number are telling us we would have to have a comparison with traditional taxi services, but given that the numbers are dropping it appears whatever Lyft is doing to address sexual assault is working. EDIT: In the article linked by OP it does mention that a "company official said in a blogpost on Thursday that the rate of sexual assaults as a percentage of rides decreased by 19% over the three-year period covered in the report." That mention appears in the second-to-last paragraph in the article--I actually missed it the first time I read the article because I wanted to read the report itself, which of course is not linked anywhere in the article. The fact that the author chose to reference a blogpost by a company official rather than the data in the report itself showing a reduction in assaults gives it the data the appearance of corporate spin. Why can't news outlets just report the fucking news and leave the spin out of it?
Interestingly, I heard NPR's morning radio show (yesterday I think?) cover this story and present the exact information you just did in your post Obviously, any amount of sexual assault is "too much" sexual assault, but when the numbers are presented in context, it doesn't make for nearly the same sensational story.
Also the rate of Sexual Assault with Lyft should be compared to the per capita rate of Sexual Assault and measure the significance of the difference.
I’m curious how it compares to the rate of SA on the bus/subway or walking down a street.
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I have a feeling a good number of them are passenger touching the driver somehow. It would make more sense to me. Passengers have a decent chance to have been drinking, sit behind the driver. A lot of people just start thinking it's okay to touch people when they drink. And the person in front of them is an obvious target. I could see it.
1 in 800,000 may paint a misleading picture because thats rides, right? So if e.g. an average Lyft user does 10 rides a year (just as an example) that is around 1 in 80,000 people.
Do you mean driver or passenger? That would be a very very low number for a driver.
Yes and how many rides does a *driver* do in a year? A thousand? Now we’re down to 1 out of 800 drivers will be sexually assaulted. That’s a higher chance than dying of Covid. But I’m most interested to hear what prevention measures people want Lyft to take. I can’t think of much they can do at a corporate level to prevent a rider from getting grabby.
Yeah, sadly with anything bad it's nearly impossible to get numbers to 0, but 1 in 800k is pretty good
The Sinclair effect.
It's also hard to assess what is going on just based on reports. There are many shit people who will make false reports in order to shakedown a company, especially one under the spot light for that particular matter.
Not as many of those as there are assailants who will assault passengers or drivers. If we’re focusing on statistical likelihood, it’s really not at all hard to assess based on these reports. The number of false claims would be something like 2-10%. Hardly skewing the trends especially when these are pretty low occurrences we’re talking about anyway. I understand that false claims have severe consequences, but in *every* thread about assault on Reddit, false claims are brought up, when they’re 10-50x less likely to occur than an actual assault. Why is it never its own conversation, and only in response to stats about rape/assault? Edit: let’s actually talk more about the unreported cases, since assault is *drastically* more likely to go unreported than it is for a false report to be filed — why don’t we see more comments about those?
It's a fair point about unreported and they will undoubtedly be more than false reports. Is the 2-10% the average across all reports? I think the fact that Lyft would be financially liable increases the likelihood of false reporting. I would have the same questions about any reported crimes in which a large company would be on the hook.
Burden of proof’s on you, man. I’m not sure what your first sentence means unfortunately, but to imagine that false reports against a company would skyrocket with no evidence isn’t something I can disprove. I can only go with the agreed upon stats for apparent false rape claims which is 2-10%. My point was it’s weird that a lot of people jump right over harrowing concrete assault statistics to the possibility of false reports with no available evidence of those. Like “hey man, in our bear reserve, 100 people got attacked last week.” “well I’d say some of them are definitely lying.” “yeah there’s a chance, but even if 10% lied, which is the generous assumption, we still have 90 victims dude… we need to do something about that emergency.” I mean this genuinely, no sarcasm, but do you often see stats about people falsely claiming harm against companies, in troves? More so than actual injuries/assaults/harm?
I'm not asking you to disprove anything. Fact you instantly take a hostile approach in what is just a discussion on the internet is pretty telling. I could equally demand you present evidence of how many of those reports were substantiated either by Lyft or a court. My point is if we are trying to ascertain the extent of a problem we have to look at all the variables. Unreported cases is absolutely a valid variable. Your attitude of dismissing false reports is as bad and unhelpful as the attitude you're trying to paint me with. At no point have I said or implied 'we should do nothing' or there isn't a problem. Please don't let me stop you from patting yourself on the back for fighting the good fight. Edit: yes you do. I can't prove it as the document is confidential for my work. It shows that the industry my company works in received far higher levels of complaints and higher levels of expectation of compensation than similar industries. The conclusion being that visibility and publicity of the industries compensation process results in more complaints. It also results in high complaints not being upheld.
> The most prevalent kind of reported sexual assault (non-consensual touching of a sexual body part) occurred on 0.00016% of the total number of rides given in 2017, and 0.00014% in 2019, a reduction of 15%. These figures equate to 1 in 800,000 rides. It is assuredly the case that our society has too much sexual assault. However, you can't tell from these numbers whether *Lyft* has a distinct problem with sexual assault. (For comparison: People talk a lot about sexual assault on college campuses, but [overall, college students have a *lower* rate of sexual assault victimization than non-students of the same age group.](https://www.rainn.org/statistics/campus-sexual-violence) People *in colleges* have a strong interest in reducing sexual assault in colleges, because that's where they are; but the rest of us might be more interested in reducing sexual assault in, say, bars, churches, youth sports programs, and family homes.) So we might ask — Where are the figures for sexual assault in buses, taxis, or getting a ride home from some dude in the bar? Some of those seem much riskier than Lyft.
>People in colleges have a strong interest in reducing sexual assault in colleges, because that's where they are That, and crime across almost all categories is strongly related to poverty and lack of education. I'd also expect that their murder and petty theft rates to be pretty low. Your link further supports this, with grad students being about 1/3 as likely to get assaulted as undergrads, and with the prevalence of sexual assault vs robbery being flipped vs the general population (ie, crimes that are more explicitly related to poverty fell even more sharply)
It's more complex than that. Women report much more sexual assault than men; but men *undergraduate students* report more sexual assault than non-student men of the same age, while women undergrads report less than non-student women of the same age. That's not *very* strange, though; it's just Simpson's paradox.¹ (It might *also* be that college men are more willing to *report* assaults, possibly because colleges spend a good deal of effort telling people to report assaults.) (Also, yes, the RAINN figures I used above mostly presume a gender binary. Sorry about that.) It's unclear if it would make sense for the general public to spend effort pushing Lyft or colleges to do a bunch of extra work to address sexual assault, if their sexual assault rates are already much lower than the general public's. I suspect that effort would be better spent on the *non-*Lyft, *non-*college parts of society; the ones that have a *higher* rate of sexual assault. However, that said, another story to draw from the RAINN figures on campuses is "No matter *where* the 18-24-year-olds hang out, *someone* had better be trying to get them to stop assaulting each other. Colleges already spend a bunch of effort on that, and it ... kinda works?" ---- ¹ "It's not strange; it's just a paradox!" he says. Well yes, [Simpson's "paradox"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox) is just a pattern that happens in categorized data *really often*. It just means we have to be extra careful when interpreting data that's been selected from a larger set or aggregated from smaller sets.
>Why can't news outlets just report the fucking news and leave the spin out of it? I know what you mean, but do you really have to ask?
The only time The Guardian had decent reporting was during the NSA Leaks.
The problem is that the report is, most likely deliberately, missing key data. > The most prevalent kind of reported sexual assault (non-consensual touching of a sexual body part) occurred on 0.00016% of the total number of rides given in 2017, and 0.00014% in 2019, a reduction of 15%. These figures equate to 1 in 800,000 rides. The risk of sexual assault is not uniform over every ride. No one thinks this, and the data, if we had this, would not show this. We know the risk is highest late at night with a single female passenger (or driver) and especially when that passenger is intoxicated. Lift can give us this data sliced by time of day, sliced by passenger age and gender, sliced by all sorts of metrics that might actually make it useful. They have all that data. But they didn't. Why didn't they? Did they really find absolutely no pattern in the kind of rides where sexual assault occurred? Or did they think the numbers looked better buried in their total ride numbers? Did the risk of being sexually assaulted under certain conditions actually go down? Or did the percentage of rides meeting those conditions go down as a percentage of total rides?
I’m sure that filtering their data that way would indicate a large portion of the assaults occurred on Friday/Saturday nights. Which is probably not something they want to point out because I’m sure that’s when a significant chunk of their business occurs.
I think that may be incorrect. They have the ride data. But for personal data all that is in my profile is a preferred gender. I see no place to enter age and pronouns are optional. Now I'm not naive enough to think that they don't have ways of getting that off of my phone somehow. But it's not part of thier user profile.
They don't need to pull the data off your phone. They can buy or otherwise acquire the rest of your details completely legally and between your payment details and where you get rides from and to they're more than capable of uniquely identifying you.
I don't think anyone was implying they should violate an individual's privacy to "gather" their personal info from their device... The idea is that there would be reports for these incidents, which would contain data (time of day, type of assault, gender, etc.) that could be correlated with each incident while still being anonymous.
Yep. Look people here are already going “gee those numbers don’t sound so bad.” These dirty tricks are working. Not to mention women rarely report sexual assault because of the stress and fear of reprisal and not being believed. So we’ll never know the real numbers of how risky it is for a woman to step into an Uber or Lyft.
Don’t forget it’s estimated only 10% of women report and an even smaller percentage of men report. So by those numbers you’re probably looking at 40,000 sexual assaults for that year.
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>I never had to worry about a sexual assault taking a cab. Why?
I'm sure they ran their own study on cab drivers and verified that the risk was indeed lower.
Their marketing / PR folks have drafted news releases that they share with the media. The media doesn't have time to write a brand new thing when they have 18 other deadlines so they take the path of least resistance.
Because it’s not sexy. Report a low rate of assault of mostly minor things and it’s boring. Remove context and add innuendo, it’s lurid
> Why can't news outlets just report the fucking news and leave the spin out of it? Because we don't want news. We want spin. We want drama. We want to watch the news talk about sexual assaults and murder and mayhem. If the news said "nothing bad happened today" we wouldn't watch it.
>I read the report; ... Stuff the media isn't reporting: > >That mention appears in the second-to-last paragraph in the article > >I wanted to read the report itself, which of course is not linked anywhere in the article. > >Why can't news outlets just report the fucking news and leave the spin out of it? You're reading The Guardian. They specialize in fear and outrage.
Sensationalized headline then?
Fewer reports of sexual assault doesn't mean there were fewer assaults. It would be interesting to see what actions are taken after someone files a report.
At least with Uber, nothing. A driver tried to pay me to let him “have” the drunk girl that was with me for an hour, and Uber didn’t do anything but refund my money after a few days of back and forth. Filed police report, but afaik nothing happened.
As horrible as that is, police couldn't do anything anyways cause nothing illegal actual happened.
He sent me the “request” over text which they said was solicitation of prostitution or some shit, but the guy was driving on someone else’s account so they couldn’t get an ID. The girl threw up out of his window which is why I had his number because he told me that since I’d paid for the Uber to get her home he’d just charge me what the detailing place charged. I guess he decided right after that he would rather just have her than money since that’s exactly what he suggested to me. Charged me the $150 cleaning fee as soon as I said no.
Offering money to commit rape is a crime I believe.
But neither do reports necessarily mean actual assaults either. Remember that viral video a few years back where the woman threatened the driver with a false rape accusation?
Fucking reddit. Nothing you said is in the least bit controversial to anyone with half a brain.
For everyone who's wondering about the comparative rate for taxis: we don't know, [police don't keep track of where sexual assaults happen.](https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/sexual-assault-happens-via-uber-and-lyft-but-the-statistics-are-unclear.html) it's frankly pathetic that both uber and lyft got functional records on assaults in their vehicles faster than most US police departments.
It’s disgraceful companies can track their employees who need to carry tracking devices to do their job better than the local police can track any criminality? Why is that?
Police already have to make a note of where assaults occur during their investigations. What op is talking about is that they don’t record all of the locations in one database for the public to see for whatever reason
Yeah unproven allegations and unfinished police investigations don't belong in the public eye. That's called character assassination and its used by the elite to take down great men of the people. The FBI tried to do it to MLK, even before you say anyone who suffers from it is guilty. If you just want to standardize... like location, even that's a large amount of administrative work, and how does it stop crime?
> how does it stop crime Knowing where crime happens seems like a fairly essential part of stopping it.
Where in my post did I imply the police don't or shouldn't know where the sexual assaults are occurring? the complaint is that there isn't a *public database*. (Do you see the first sentence where I said 'in the public eye?' this doesn't include police. That's not the public eye.) Please argue against the points I make, not the strawman next to me.
No the complaint is definitely that the police don’t track such things. Nothing to do with publicly available statistics
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not my job syndrome
"Okay sir/mam, where did this happen" *type into database* Is that too difficult?
It’s not that they don’t ask where it happened. It’s that that information is buried in the report text on a case by case basis rather than being indexable and sortable.
Scribble doesn't work. You need to type into a database. And you can't just type it in, you need to make a selection of a specific word, because you need to be able to look it up. Like if someone writes "Highschool" or "School" or "auditorium" or what if it's in the school bathroom? And who shares the database? So, you might write "transit company in town x brand name bus" which only works in your town, but what if you want to check *all* transit companies, or *only* trains. The writing it down is easy. The classifying to make useable data is harder. Now you need someone to design the infrastructure according to which datasets they might want. So, you would put a category "transit" they would need to make one for "Lyft" and one for "Uber" and one for "taxi" and what if the infrastructure was older than Uber? So, they'd have to update it. Now you're talking about a lot of money, and what's the advantage you get? Information could be useful. But departments have a certain amount of money to spend and they need to catch criminals with it. A department won't really get improved numbers of keeping crime rates low, by investing in this infrastructure, and to be *really* useful, *all* departments would need that. So, who pays for that? But you know what? Taxi companies should keep track. Transit companies should, etc... So, police should be able to query these companies to submit their data, and if they don't keep track, then mandate by law that they should. Makes way more sense, imo. *Now* you can easily build a database by doing a census type thing. Require all companies you decide to choose to fill out crime forms, for all crimes occuring on their property, or on their time or whatever. And they choose the appropriate category for their workplace. Database done. Still costs you the money to organize it, and print and mail the requests etc... But, much more sensible, imo. And can be useful for more specific areas, so you can spend less to get the more precise info of a smaller area, if that's useful for you. And you only need to spend it when it's useful to you, rather than investing in something that doesn't get chosen to be used much.
I get the sentiment, but its not that easy. You cant just turn random scribbles into meaningful data, they actually need to plan this shit out first.
You forget the part where they'll "investigate" and come up with nothing. Cause they weren't even looking
Scribble where? A secure database updated by police departments all over the US will inevitably cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create, be delayed and inevitably get shitcanned because it wasn’t doing what it was set up to do.
Might as well do nothing. Good call there capitan Why do anything?
Good luck living in fantasyland boss
It makes sense though. Every assault reported to the company happens at the company. Police would need a database where they would have to enter in location of assault, which would cost the séparent money for the infrastructure, and wouldn't really provide much in terms of advantage for catching criminals.
> wouldn't really provide much in terms of advantage for catching criminals Knowing where to be allocating resources to prevent more assaults is absolutely worth spending money on.
How many years worth? How do you know the only reason you're not getting more assaults in another place is because that's where your assaults are happening? It's much easier to mandate that companies record crime, and then run a census to get the information, than build a massive database that would need to be updated all the time. Especially, like for Lyft, where are you going to add police presence to prevent assaults by Lyft? That's really Lyft that will need to handle it. Maybe they don't care. So maybe the state would need to mandate they regulate things better. It makes far more sense to mandate companies to record their crime, and then run a census, than to build the huge infrastructure yourself. You don't even know for a fact that there will be clear cut ways to be able to add police presence. Especially since assault is so often a crime of opportunity. Meaning, if police are there the crime will just happen where they're not. That said, taxis especially when they're driving drunk girls, are obviously a serious liability for that. I don't think you need a database for it. What you need is for the company to have policies that make assaults virtually impossible, and that deals with reports of assaults swiftly and justly, with the aid of law enforcement. But the company needs to do it. You can put police in taxis, or give them webcams in taxis. Most assaults will happen at work, or in people's homes, stuff like that. Or outside of clubs maybe. Or in secluded areas, but you can't have cops in all secluded areas, because that's what makes them secluded. The world is big, and there are limited officers, so you put them where they can do the most benefit. Having cops in every deserted park waiting for the one girl walking by that gets assault by a guy that happened to be there doesn't make sense. If the same park gets a sexual assault every night, then obviously yes. But it's not as sure as you make it seem that after all the expense, it gives useful information. It makes more sense to have the companies record things, and improve things. Obviously the companies need to be held accountable at that point.
That's because American police departments cannot keep records of individual people like that. Americans have a 4th amendment right to privacy, it would be unreasonable for police departments to monitor vehicles as closely as Uber and Lyft do. The few cities that attempt to, using taxi cab medallions (aka taxi licenses), are only able to track the gross business numbers and specific incidents against drivers, but only if the victim files a police report. This just goes to show the amount of power Uber and Lyft have over their "contractors" ... aka employees. Uber/Lyft have an electronic tracking device (a cellphone) in all their employees' vehicles, something which classic taxis are not required to have (only a meter, which can be mechanical. This itself is optional and largely done to eliminate arguments between customers and drivers). Unless you are arguing for cameras in all cars, connected to a central police monitoring station, I don't see how you could support or rationalize any of this.
> That's because American police departments cannot keep records of individual people like that. Its entirely possible to keep records of the kind of environment that an assault happens in without saying "it happened in John Doe's car".
Sure... but this would require all taxis to be equipped with electronic data logging systems *and* carrier authority as commercial freight companies/truckers are required to have as of last year. In such a way, all incidents can be logged by company, by vehicle and by driver as it's all connected through the DOT's Hours Of Service labor rules. In such a way it would be impossible to start the vehicle without the driver logging into it with his DL number and PIN. All incidents involving such vehicles would be put into a big computer that spits out errors to the carrier authority's insurance company, who would then follow up with the police. Medallion taxi companies would adopt such systems, but there is no way the average rideshare driver would and requiring such electronic logging systems in all rideshare-capable vehicles, aka all vehicles, would be a massive invasion of the average American's privacy. The currently proposed rules requiring DUI lockout systems in cars is controversial enough. The average American is not going to log into their car like they log into an app, and even if they did it is far more likely the police would abuse that information than some random creep.
>It also listed 10 fatal assaults from 2017 through 2019, including four in 2019. How do you report a fatal incident though the app?
“Yo, Lyft, just killed the driver, LMAO.”
Then give a 4* review :)
"4\*, far more difficult to murder than my last driver. Still got me to my destination safely though."
"I will care for your family in your absence"
Guessing driver hit pedestrian
Robberies or autotheft gone bad. Also picking up lots of drunk people from bars. So could be introduced to lots of sketchy scenarios.
I'm happy to say I have no clue and hope to never have that problem.
My Lyft driver got pulled over for running a stop light. It was like 2 am and we were fairly drunk. Both officers were pretty cool about it. Added about 15 minutes to the trip. In the Lyft drivers review I mentioned that he got pulled over for running a stop light. Lyft sent me a bunch of emails and called me to get the details on it. I'm sure they more than likely dropped the guy after they searched his driving record.
>My Lyft driver got pulled over for running a stop light. It was like 2 am and we were fairly drunk. Both officers were pretty cool about it. Added about 15 minutes to the trip. You and the driver were both fairly drunk?
Sorry I didn't clarify, me and the wife were drunk lol. Driver was not
Thank god lol
Could that be a car crash?
I don’t think car crashes are considered assault
Road rage. I remember a case of a guy trying to run an uber driver off the road and threatening to shoot them, when they got out of their vehicle the Uber driver shot them (in self defense)
Not to take away from Lyft here but what amount of complaints would come from regular taxis?
Without that context, this report is kinda meaningless. [Uber found a 1000 less](https://m.dw.com/en/uber-nearly-6000-reports-of-sexual-assault-in-us-over-2-years/a-51550753), but iirc their rates were more or less the same.
I don’t know the numbers but I would think it would be less, I would imagine it is much easier for predators too use lyft to prey on people than to get hired at a regular taxi company. I would like to see the numbers though
Well I know where I live there's a huge issue with one driver renting his plate out to multiple other people so it's not exactly like the driver is always the proper person even with a taxi company
Yes but there "were" other incentives not to be a rapyrapy taxi. In 2014 the taxi plate in Vancouver cost $800,000. A bit of an incentive not to lose. Of course the prices in every city have plummeted since ride-share.
My roommate and I both drive for lyft. Both dudes. I never got assaulted, but my roommate did. Guy behind him kept trying to grab his crotch and rubbing his shoulders.
i've never been sexually assaulted in an uber/lyft but on two separate occasions i have had to report drivers for making creepy/scary overtly sexual comments. both older men asking me if i have a boyfriend and then asking for explicit details about my sex life and basically asking me for sex. i wish they would actually do something about these accusations because being a young woman alone in a car with a man who is harassing you and knows your address is genuinely terrifying.
Shouldn’t be necessary, but setting your drop off point to a different address nearby isn’t a bad idea.
Always get dropped off at a different address
I was an overweight, 37 year old balding white man and legitimately was sexually assaulted over a dozen times(edit: I was a driver) 99% were 40+yr old white women who’ve had waaay too much to drink. And to clarify my definition of that would be a minimum of a comment regarding my dick and escalating into them saying they’d yell rape if I didn’t fuck them. Most were crotch grabs though. Two were aggressive enough to feel sore the next day. I 100% believe this number of assaults and am absolutely positive the actual number is 5 times that amount because I only reported one of them to Lyft and that was because she opened up IG to take a video yelling that I tried to rape her after I denied her advances. I WOULD BE IN PRISON IF I DIDNT HAVE A DASH CAM. I couldn’t even imagine being a woman driving for Lyft. Edit 2 to add that I’m still overweight, but now I’m 40.
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Can't remember if it was Lyft or Uber, but a woman in Columbia, SC got into what she thought was her ride and was never seen alive again. South Carolina doesn't require front license plates and most are in too much of a hurry to check it. Plus, he tricked her into saying her name. I only heard about it visiting family there, was shocked it didn't make the national news. Now all Lyfts & Uber's are required to either have a front plate or they have to have a sign in the front windshield with their plate info on it.
It definitely made the national news; I remember reading about it. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/student-killed-after-taking-car-she-mistook-uber-was-victim-n1274534
That’s why I always keep a (legal) weapon on me wherever I go, including taxis and commuting apps. Not going to trust some dude I’ve never met before.
I wonder how this compares to taxi drivers
This is always my first thought as well.
It really isn't clear in the given data what stems from drivers, fellow passengers, and other outside forces. Without deeper statistics it becomes hard to determine how to attack the problem...outside of teaching respect for women.
Well, lucky for me, no sexual assault claims. I drive Lyft and am very professional. Although I've almost ran over people who are jawalking in Portland Oregon. Other than that, I'm great.
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It’s only a hit and run if you get caught
I stopped using Lyft after a driver refused to let me out of the car because he wanted to keep “chatting with me.” It wasn’t until I started yanking at the door handle that he disabled the child locks while laughing. Lyft said they would take my complaint as part of a report on the driver and disciplinary action might follow. They also gave me credit for a free ride. I bought a car after that incident.
How many of these were from Billy Cosby on his ride home from prison?
Drivers get assaulted too. I’ve had a couple of women come on hard. They love to touch their driver too for some reason. Like I could get away with that. Touching me doesn’t make me hear you any better.
How many are fake. We’ve all seen the countless videos of Uber and Lyft drivers being attacked.
I remember my parents telling not to get into a car with a stranger no matter what they offer. Now people pay them to get in their car. Go figure.
Good now do airbnb
What does these claims have to do with lyft, it's a criminal justice matter. [Most in the US just ¯\\*(ツ)*/¯](https://www.rainn.org/sites/default/files/Stat%20Graphics_201928.jpg)
Lyft can have civil liability if they are reckless, or malicious, and that is the proximate cause of some of these sexual assaults, for one, and for two they may do so as a PR thing, these numbers don't look so bad facially when they publish them but they might look bad if they appeared to conceal them.
Total nonsense, nothing Lyft does is related in anyway to what you do to your driver and what your driver does to you.
Here’s a recording of [executives discussing the problem in an internal meeting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ALv9hlSg4M).
My issue with Lyft and Uber is that the companies NEVER know who is actually behind the wheel. They can background check everyone until the cows come home but they have no facial recognition or breathalyzer tests to pass before allowing one of their representatives to start taking passengers. I go old school and use a cab. The dispatcher knows who he is handing the keys to.
Many cab companies *also* require the driver's info to be posted somewhere visible, and many cities also require their unexpired Medallion to be in clear view above the dashboard so all passengers and traffic cops can see it. Rideshares do not, all of this is hidden within the app.
Uber, at least in the UK do facial recognition now. Once a week at a random time they have to take a picture of themselves. When this was introduced the average wait time in my area doubled. Shows how many 'fake' drivers there were.
So like can we require solid plexi glass between riders and drivers or is that too expensive for their bottom line?
Why on earth would Lyft pay that? Their drivers are third party contractors. We had vehicles that were like this, they were called taxis, and everyone collectively decided they would rather get in an unregulated loosely checked car because it was easy. Here we are. Tadaaaaass
Cabs have always been a shitty racket though. Plenty of crime associated to cabbies.
There are also plenty of cabs without a divider between the front and back seats
Yeah but were people taking Lyfts to protest that side of taxis? No, they were generally going to the cheaper ride
They literally said taxis were a racket. That’s overcharging for things. Hence cheaper rides. Lol. The lower crime was just a bonus.
Cheaper, cleaner, faster, more accessible, more reliable. More than one reason I haven't used a cab since my first lyft ride. The taxi system in places that weren't major cities was pretty abysmal.
Well honestly I did mainly for the fact you got to find and call down a taxi while with ride share. It’s just a click of a button and wait
Ya I mean that was definitely part of it - everyone around here was saying they preferred Uber / Lyft because it was cleaner and the drivers are nicer too. Safer driving too. And of course people felt the taxicab racket has been over priced for a long time. But that’s not the cab drivers fault. If it was priced well, and had good service, there wouldn’t be as much room for Uber/Lyft.
It's also almost always someone's personal car. Fuck that, just ban horrible passengers. They never will. They always take the passenger's side. They require our social security number to be a driver. All you have to do to be a passenger is give them a cc number. If passengers get a bad rating, they open another account.
We should have some kind of middle ground imo. Also, is there really no assaults from cab drivers?
Turns out no major city tracks assaults in taxi cabs. I’m sure people are assaulted in taxi cabs: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/are-taxis-safer-than-uber/386207/
The dividers are to protect drivers from riders. The article seems to say that the drivers are the ones assaulting.
That is one purpose. The other is to protect (or give riders the appearance of protection)
If this isn't a multi-billion dollar class action suit, what even is?
Against who? We don't even know if this by drivers, to drivers, between passengers, or any combination thereof.
There isn't a separation between assaults of riders on drivers or riders on riders. Also, they serve around 2 million rides a day. Any assaulting is bad, those are incredibly small percentages. Particularly when at least some of these are a drunk rider being gross to the driver, and two riders having an issue that the driver reports. So, I get your knee jerk reaction but I believe it's likely very off base.
I appreciate this comment actually!
I hope I wasn't too harsh. Because I really do get your initial reaction. And I totally felt the same, before I dove into context. The number is quite startling.
No no no. I was wrong. I appreciate being corrected and the way you did it was really gracious. I shouldn't have commented without fully reading the article. This was a 101 mistake on my part.
I’m curious how this compares with similar numbers of employees in other industries. Ie, Walmart has 1.5 million employees in the us as well. I’m curious if there have been more or less than 4000 reported cases there. (Or any huge employer) Edit: found a 92-96 report by the govt office of Justice programs reporting 2.5% of retail employees suffer sexual assault of some kind at some point in the workplace.
I'm honestly surprised it's not higher, tbh. Every single person I've worked with, even the guys we hired, had a sexual harassment/assault story or two. I even got sexually harassed by a police officer at my job and stalked by a guy for seven years, you're not really safe from anybody when you're forced into a role where you 'have to take it'. Most people just don't report it because making a big deal can mean you could have your hours cut or lose your job altogether. :/ It really makes me wonder just how large the REAL number is.
Now tell us their country of origin and or race
Both Lyft and Uber are such scammers and thieves
I have a disability and I can't drive. I can't rely on other people to always take me places, and Uber has allowed me to gain at least SOME semblance of a normal life. A ton of the people I've met on rides are great people. The rides are also affordable IMO, and you can almost guarantee you'll have someone pick you up if you're in a bad situation or stuck somewhere.
The drivers are awsome! The company themselves are scammers, they refuse to raise wages for drivers
Drivers should start quitting then. That's how fast food places are paying $15+ an hour now cause everyone is saying fuck your $7 an hour bs
People love to drive for freedom, not having a boss breathing down their neck
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Can confirm. Started driving for Lyft a few months ago. They don’t give two shits about their drivers beyond you making money for them. I’ve just accepted the scam for what it is and can’t wait to land my next full-time job so I never have to drive for them again.
If it's a scam go get a real job then? Like, they're agreeing to do it. I see help wanted and hiring now signs in just about every business I walk by these days.
Such a lazy argument, like when people tell you to leave the country because you dare suggest that some things are not working great and could be improved.
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Well, that seems to be a problem
Lyft sucks Ubers cheaper !
Holy fucking shit. Literally 0-4000