Reporting the Deadly Drivers in California

From Robert LewisCalmness

This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

Calmatters wanted to find out how California was dealing with dangerous drivers. When we started looking at it, we found that while there were studies of infrastructure, technological and engineering solutions, there was a slight study of drivers who cause bad crashes.

That is why we asked the California Department of Motor vehicles for driver data involved in fatal and serious clashes. The agency said it would cost thousands of dollars and it would take many, many months to provide such data. One of the reasons: DMV will have to pay external technical experts to request their own database that dates back to “the late 70s and has been built, at least in part, in the programming language that dates back to the 1950s,” says Joseph Chapman, the agency’s lawyer.

We then tried to receive reports on cities, but this is not always a public file.

As a decision, we went to all 58 district prosecutors in the state and asked for lists of murder and murder cases filed from 2019 until the beginning of last year. This is a subset of fatal catastrophes. Approximately 1 in 5 fatal clashes seem to lead to a criminal case in California.

The records provided a foundation to study what causes deadly accidents. But they were just lists. They did not tell us the story of each case. In order to understand the details, we will need to review the court records. However, there is no centralized system for court records in California. We will have to review them personally.

We have sent a team of nine reporters to courts throughout the country to review more than 3600 cases, or on paper or from a computer terminal in the Court of Justice.

We were able to do this review for everyone, except for two counties that had cases of murder. Santa Cruz District Attorney Jeffrey Rosel was the only one who refused to list cases. San Bernardino provided us with a list, but we were unable to review the specific cases – approximately 300 – for various reasons: the files were not available to the courtroom, the depicted documents were not uploaded to the public portals in the court, and the official stated that the office had lost our request for information on penal complaints.

Finally, we had to find out the driving records of people who were killed in murder.

According to the state legislation, certain information about the driver’s record is public. In general, this includes accidents and quotes over the last three years, DUI over the last 10 years and information about any suspensions or withdrawals that have been in force or have recently been canceled. So, while records are not particularly useful for identifying a long -term reckless driving model, they show the latest incidents and the current driver’s license status.

We have placed thousands of DMV requests for driver records using information collected from court records, such as driving licenses and birth dates. (We were unable to look for some defendants, as the web portal of the recording of the records allows only a search for a certain length – the family names of some drivers were just too long. In other cases it is possible to have a bad driver’s license or other information that does not match what is in the DMV. Murder from 2019.

Manual introduction of information from the reports in our deadly database of deadly drivers, we were able to notice the trends.

We then contacted employees, experts, families of victims, prosecutors, defenders and drivers accused of causing deadly crashes. We contacted a defense lawyer or the defendant – often both – in any case, mentioned in history. Unless it was noted in history, they either refused to talk to us or did not answer.

It’s The first story From what will be a continuing series, looking at deadly drivers in California and the systemic problems that lead to so many deaths on the roadway. If you have advice, send an email to the reporter to the robert@calmatters.orgS

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.