Traffic Justice

It's hard to imagine a more egregiously clear-cut case where a driver deserves a harsh prison term than when drunk driver Kieran Brewer ran over and killed a minor inside a crosswalk. Surely, unlike other cases where sober drivers killed pedestrians and faced few consequences, these circumstances would spur the judicial system into action.

District Attorney George Gascón has announced that he will hire an attorney devoted to handling vehicular manslaughter cases, in what could be a major step toward bringing accountability to drivers who kill.

Western Cesar Chavez Street has been transformed after decades as a dangerous motor vehicle speedway that divided the Mission and Bernal Heights neighborhoods. City officials cut the ribbon today on a redesign of the street, nearly nine years after residents began pushing for safety improvements.

[Editor's note: Streetsblog will not be publishing Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.]

In what could be a departure from the SF Police Department's usual failure to penalize reckless driving, officers have arrested two of the five motorists who have killed people on San Francisco streets since December 20.

The SFPD's Major Accident Investigation Team has been renamed the Traffic Collision Investigation Team, and the department's website has removed the term "accident" from its contact info page. The news follows a Streetsblog post on October 21, in which we pointed out that SFPD regularly violates its official policy of referring to car crashes as "collisions."

Anyone who keeps track of the daily reports that come out of the SFPD's press office might be surprised to learn that the department has a policy of using the term "collision" -- not "accident" -- when referring to traffic crashes. That's because, in practice, the SFPD's top brass and press officers use "accident" as their term of choice, while "collision" is used only occasionally.

On October 4, a truck driver crushed 68-year-old Emitt Jackson, pinning him against a parked vehicle and killing him. But police have yet to release the name of the driver, any further information on the investigation, and whether the driver could face charges. Jackson is at least the 11th pedestrian to be killed in SF this year.

When Sarah Harling was hospitalized by a minivan driver who made a left turn into her at a stop sign intersection, she says the SFPD officer who filed the police report included a fabricated statement from her claiming that she "approached the stop sign without stopping."