> It's a representative example.
This is the assertion. You can recognize it because the obvious reply is that it is not at all a representative example, but one that you just handpicked. You're question-begging.
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Here' I'll do the needful:
Twin Cities, 2010-2014: 95 pedestrians killed in 3,069 crashes. 28 drivers were charged and convicted of a crime, most often a misdemeanor ranging from speeding to careless driving. ~70% of pedestrian-killing drivers faced no criminal charge[0].
Bay Area, 2007-2011 (CIR investigation): sixty percent of drivers that were at fault, or suspected of being at fault, faced no criminal charges. Over 40 percent of drivers charged did not lose their driver's licenses, even temporarily[1].
Philadelphia, 2017–2018: just 16 percent of the drivers were charged with a felony in fatal crashes[2].
Los Angeles, 2010–2019: 2,109 people were killed in traffic collisions on L.A. streets... and nearly half were pedestrians. Booked on vehicular manslaughter: 158 people. The vast majority of drivers who kill someone with their car are not arrested[3].
I can literally do this all day. The original statement was correct, the case representative.
[0]: https://www.startribune.com/in-crashes-that-kill-pedestrians...
[1]: https://walksf.org/2013/05/02/investigative-report-exposes-h...
[2]: https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-drivers-rarely-prosec...
[3]: https://laist.com/news/transportation/takeaways-pedestrian-d...
As the saying goes: If you want to kill someone and get the lightest possible consequences, kill them with your car.
Now we’re talking. So much misinformation in this thread. There’s a reason that the saying, “if you want to kill someone, do it with a car” exists. Fortunately, it seems like judges are finally starting to wake up to the idea that it’s unreasonable for drivers to claim ignorance about the increased risks (and thus intent) of making poor/illegal decisions when being the wheel.
The original statement was about vehicular manslaughter. You are citing stats that cover a much broader range of things.
This thread talks about driverless cars; vehicular manslaughter requires negligence or intent, do you want to find narrowed statistics for driverless cars that are restricted to negligence or intent?
The branch of the thread those statistics were in is about human driven cars.
You're likely falling for a red herring.
Criminality is basically just a checkbox for this stuff. Most of the time people wouldn't be going to jail for these sorts of crimes, it'd just be big fines and penalties. There's almost always administrative/civil infractions of the same or similar name that has the same or greater punishment but are far more efficient for the state to prosecute because the accused has fewer rights.
It makes for good appeal to emotion headlines to say these people aren't getting charged with crimes, but that's only half the story. They're likely lawyering up and pleading to a civil infraction that has approx the same penalties.
And this is true not just for this issue but for many subject areas of administrative law. Taxes, SEC, environmental, etc, etc, all operate mostly like this.
It's easy for a writer to pander to certain demographics and get people whipped into a frenzy by writing an easy article about prosecuting rates using public data. Actually contacting these agencies and figuring out what they actually did is hard and in the modern media economy doesn't offer much upside for the work.
Someone (i forget who) wrote that if someone invented a technology equally beneficial and equally harmful it wouldnt even be considered today but 100 years ago they wouldnt even question it. It was labor as usual.
Personally i would like to see a more granual permission to drive based on performance, need and demography.
Ok, so give an actual example.