Welcome to the first Comment of the Week since former writer of this column, Lisa Caballero, bid us all adieu. And boy do I miss her help!
Y’all left 515 comments last week. While I do scan and/or read all of them prior to hitting “approve,” I’m not sure I can really digest entire threads and engage and interact with them to the extent they deserve. (Not sure if it’s clear to everyone reading this but BikePortland is essentially a one-person operation.) That being said, I will continue to try and I’m not ready to give up on COTW just yet.
Going forward, I’ll be even more reliant on your nominations. So pretty please, if you read a comment that you think is insightful, productive, smart, fresh, informative, provocative, etc., please reply with a comment that includes “comment of the week” or “COTW”. That way I can do a search for those terms on Monday morning and see all the best comments.
This week I’ve chosen a comment from qqq. It was in response to my opinion piece about one of the reasons the City of Portland is having a difficult time reducing traffic deaths. qqq was clearly annoyed at the police crash statement about a recent fatal collision on SE Division, where the Portland Police Bureau (once again) went out of their way to absolve the driver. Here’s the comment:
“… the next thing the police do regularly after saying the driver cooperated, etc. is say the pedestrian or cyclist victim was ‘wearing dark clothing’, ‘was not wearing hi-viz clothing’, ‘had no rear light’, ‘had no helmet’, etc. – all things that aren’t required by law, but that sound like they are because the police are pointing them out.
Yet I’ve never once seen a police statement saying that the driver’s vehicle lacked anything that wasn’t required: ‘The car lacked a backup camera, ABS brakes, traction control…’. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a report mentioning a legal problem with the car, other than no license plate: “’The car’s headlight was burned out, the tires were bald, the windshield was darkly tinted, the mirror was missing, the side window was obstructed…’).”
And as we learned in this specific case, the driver on SE Division was indeed in the wrong and was cited for careless driving.
qqq makes an excellent and accurate point. It adds fuel to my idea that PPB should adopt a crash statement template; sort of like a Mad Lib-style form where they just fill in key facts and don’t make any subjective statements whatsoever.
Thanks to Fred for the nomination. And thanks for all the great comments last week.
