Our Letter to Pasadena Now - Orange Grove Fatality Reporting
We wrote a letter to Pasadena Now regarding their reporting of the fatal crash at Orange Grove at Marengo. We were pleased to see that Pasadena Now published the letter today, Monday November 16, 2020. Here’s the link to the page on Pasadena Now and here’s the letter:
Thank you for covering the fatal hit-and-run at Orange Grove and Marengo yesterday. We appreciate your continued use of the word "collision" and not "accident".
However, we are writing to make three additional suggestions regarding the coverage of collisions in Pasadena Now:
1) One of the statements in the coverage is: "...the vehicle continued east and fled the scene". It was the _driver_ who continued east. Cars don't kill people, drivers do. Recent research by Dr. Tara Goddard, a Texas A&M Professor, shows that media framing of traffic violence that removes driver responsibility subtly shifts blame toward the victim and encourages people to assume nothing can be done to change road safety.
2) Pasadena has exceptionally unsafe roads for people on foot and people riding bicycles, and very unsafe roads for everyone, including people driving cars. We are the 2nd most dangerous city of our size in California for people who are walking, and the 4th most dangerous for people riding bicycles. We are the 12th most dangerous city overall, out of 58 cities of our size.
This is a problem similar to the one we are having with the pandemic in this country right now - people don't know that the U.S. has the highest rate of infections and deaths of any developed country, so they believe (reasonably) "This is just how it is, we can't do anything about it."
If a reader of Pasadena Now has not been told that Pasadena is one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. for traffic violence, then it makes perfect sense that they will think, "This is just how it is, we can't do anything about it."
3) Finally, we recommend including information that is more specific to the crash location and details in all reporting about traffic crashes. For example:
How many pedestrians have been injured or killed in Pasadena in the past year?
How many victims of hit and run collisions have there been in the past year?
How many pedestrians have been injured or killed on Orange Grove near Marengo?
What other hit and run collisions have occurred near this location? (PN reported on a hit and run victim who was bicycling on Marengo within the past year, for example).
What other pedestrian injuries and fatalities have happened nearby? (A pedestrian was recently killed on Washington Blvd. near El Molino).
Without this context, it will be easy for readers to assume that this collision at Orange Grove and Marengo is an isolated incident, which it is not.
We can and should be doing much more to make our streets safer. The reading public can better evaluate the problems if they are being given complete information.
Thank you,
Blair Miller and Colin Bogart
