Uber and Gun Violence: A Glance at the Data
On June 10th, 2015, the popular ridesharing company Uber made waves in certain media circles when it announced a formal ban on guns in all active vehicles. Prior to that, communications to drivers had discouraged concealed firearms but ultimately left the question to state laws. This time it was official.
The new policy took effect not after but before the tragic slaying of nine church members at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which prompted another round of national conversations about gun control laws and violence. What likely did inform Uber’s decision was a rather bizarre incident two months earlier, when an UberX driver with a concealed carry permit prevented a mass shooting in Chicago’s Logan Square by gunning down a 22 year-old man who had opened fire on a crowd of civilians. The 47 year-old driver was not charged.
Citing the Chicago incident as their exhibit A, gun rights bloggers responded to the ban with accusations that Uber was vying for PR points at the expense of drivers’ and passengers’ safety. Their position was emboldened two weeks later when an UberX driver in Queens was robbed at gun-point a little after midnight on a Wednesday morning. Conservative sites excitedly connected the dots. Breitbart reported it with the headline, “Uber Driver Robbed at Gunpoint Two Weeks After Company Disarmed Drivers”. The blog Personal Defense World framed it similarly: “Uber Driver Robbed At Gunpoint After Company Bans Guns In Vehicles”. Gun control debates among rideshare drivers erupted across the internet in forums, Facebook groups, and comment threads with a notable number of drivers balking at the new rule.
More interesting, many critics argued that the company’s very announcement of the gun-free policy was tantamount to hanging targets on its own vehicles and creating a “fish-in-barrel” playground for criminals. A post by Bob Owens on the conservative blog, Bearing Arms, summed up the popular sentiment among gun-owners: “Now that the company has publicly announced that they are ‘gun-free,’ criminals will intentionally target Uber drivers as easy marks, just as retail stores who have publicly announced that they are ‘gun-free’ almost always see a rash of robberies after those announcements are made.”
Owens cited no examples of such rashes of robberies, but support for such claims has always been more anecdotal than evidence-based. Virtually all research on the subject has correlated higher gun ownership to higher incidence of gun-related injury and death, particularly suicide (This Slate article offers good summary of the data). Furthermore, there is no methodologically sound study supporting the position that higher gun ownership reduces crime. Indeed, the popular belief that guns make us safer may be founded entirely upon its intuitive appeal: It simply makes sense to think that criminals will be less likely to rob you if they know you might be carrying a gun. Along the same line of logic, they will surely be more likely to rob you if they know for certain that you are not carrying a gun.
Of course, as many Uber drivers on social media have pointed out, Uber’s ban on firearms is unlikely to persuade anyone who was already carrying a concealed weapon to stop carrying it now. The policy is virtually impossible to enforce except as retroactive punishment after an incident has already taken place—presumably after the driver was forced to use the gun in self-defense—and by that point the need for such protection would be implicitly justified. This may someday happen, but as of today, there has not been a reported incident of an Uber driver defending him or herself against a gun-point robbery.
Drivers safety is of course a serious concern. After all, cab driving claims the highest homicide rate of any vocation, with more taxi drivers murdered every year than police officers. There is surprisingly little statistical data tracking crimes and violence perpetrated against taxi drivers in the U.S., but it is well-documented as a high-risk job. Extremely high risk. In fact, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) estimates that taxi drivers are 60 times more likely to be murdered on the job than other workers. It is therefore worth investigating whether or not arming drivers with concealed guns would increase their safety.
Currently, New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission says no, citing passenger and public safety as the primary concern guiding the policy. The NIOSH agrees, advising taxi drivers not to “carry a firearm or other weapons as a means of self-defense. In most robberies, the suspect is armed with a weapon and has the tactical advantage both in surprise and position”.
It is no surprise that Uber has not published an official report of crime stats for its fleet. Putting the spotlight on gunpoint robberies would do the company’s public image no service, no matter how much better they are than those of taxis. Uber did however volunteer one study titled “Uber’s Impact on Taxi Crime in Chicago”, published in April 2014 on its own Newsroom blog. The author was named simply Lauren, evidently an Uber employee, and no other authors or researchers were credited. The study analyzed the City of Chicago’s crime database and applied what it called a “simple econometric model to estimate the impact of Uber on crime in taxicabs”. The blog reported its results before explaining its methodology, in bold print: “Compared to the 300 days before Uber entered, the rate of taxicab-located crimes decreased by 20% in the 300 days after Uber entered.”
Lauren offered Uber’s own explanations of the trend, both of which seem plausible: First, the “online” nature of the service itself—its rating system, drivers’ and customers’ personal accounts, and the implicit trackability of all activity; Second, but hardly a lesser factor, Uber’s cashless, electronic payment system, which significantly differentiates it from taxi services, and, as some research linked in the article suggests, might discourage crooks from holding up vehicles.
Uber’s contribution to the debate on crime and safety is welcome, but it does not at all settle the discussion. What we still sorely lack is data on the crime that has taken place in Uber vehicles; and as much as Uber would love to deny it, violent incidents are not rampant but hardly unheard of. Unfortunately, the company has a proven track record of guarding its own data, a practice that recently compelled a California administrative law judge to recommend suspending the service in the state until it complied. So, lacking any comprehensive national data, the most reliable sources of information on Uber-related crime are local police departments and media reports.
For the purposes of this article, I ruled it sufficient to start with the latter. In light of the recent gun control debates, I decided to conduct some preliminary internet research on the most reported Uber-related incidents that have taken place in the United States in the past two years to see what kind of violence has been committed and how it should inform our opinions about Uber’s decision to ban concealed weapons in vehicles. My report is by no means exhaustive, and I welcome all comments and corrections, but I believe I have uncovered enough to add perspective to the conversation. For one thing, it should be enough to show that robberies have been taking place well before the gun ban. More important, if the pressing concern at the moment is driver safety, a review of the data as it is presently available should persuade us to extend our concern to passenger safety just as well.
Below are just some of the most reported violent incidents in Uber vehicles since the 2014 launch of the company’s low-cost livery service, UberX.
In July 2014, a woman in Atlanta claimed to have been robbed by a “potentially fake Uber driver”.
In September 2014, an Uber driver in Atlanta pulled a gun on a valet during a heated argument while waiting to pick up a passenger, threatening to kill him. Uber issued a statement claiming that “unless expressly permitted by law, driver partners are not allowed to carry weapons on a trip.” The driver was not arrested.
In October 2014, an Uber driver in Salt Lake City claimed that a passenger from the previous night had held gun to his head. The driver managed to flee the vehicle and there was no attempted robbery. Sources later revealed that the passenger was a cop.
In November 2014, an Uber driver in South Los Angeles was stabbed in face and neck by two individuals after pulling over to ask them for directions. There was no robbery reported.
In December 2014, an Uber driver in Crown Heights, New York was robbed at gun point by four passengers while driving them to their destination. The suspects fled with the driver’s phone and $270 in cash.
In March 2015, a Miami Uber driver was robbed and carjacked at gunpoint while waiting for a passenger.
In April 2015, a San Francisco passenger was chased down, beaten and robbed by his Uber driver after fleeing the vehicle. Uber spokeswoman Kate Downen’s response to the crime was defensive: “This man called an Uber, it’s not fair to say he got into one.”
That same month, a Chicago Uber driver with a concealed weapons permit prevented a mass shooting by shooting down a lone gunmen who had opened fire on a crowd in Logan Square.
Two months later, in June 2015, Uber issued its public statement officially banning firearms in all vehicles. Meanwhile, a mother sued Uber for $2m claiming her daughter had been sexually assaulted by a driver taking her home from school.
Two weeks after that, on June 25th, an Uber driver in Queens was robbed with a rifle. The suspect fled with $60 in cash. As mentioned earlier, conservative bloggers pounced on the story.
Five days later, on June 30th, a 75-year-old Florida Uber driver got into an argument with a passenger and shot him in the foot. He claimed the passenger was choking him.
The next month, in July 2015, a Chicago Uber driver’s argument with his passengers turned violent. After exiting the vehicle, one of them threw a rock at it and shattered the sun roof. The driver responded by pulling out a concealed semi-automatic pistol and opening fire on them. No one was injured. The driver was later deactivated from the Uber platform.
This is not a comprehensive tally of the violent incidents involving Uber contractors (For a more comprehensive list, visit WhosDrivingYou.org). It does not include all of the robberies perpetrated against drivers, nor does it even attempt to include the myriad reports of sexual assault committed by Uber drivers (or men posing as drivers). But these incidents should be enough to tell us three things. First, Uber drivers were being robbed long before the gun ban. Second, the informal and unregulated nature of Uber’s service raises safety concerns as serious for passengers as for drivers. Third, the features of Uber’s app that the company has credited for reducing crime are by no means guarantors of safety. Most alarming, it is apparent that the threat of deactivation from the Uber platform is not enough to prevent some drivers from acting out violently against passengers (or, as in the Atlanta driver’s case, valets).
What we need at the moment are reliable statistics on crimes committed not only against Uber drivers but by Uber drivers as well. Based on the news reports available on the internet, it is not clear who, from a statistical standpoint, has more to fear in an Uber vehicle, the driver or the passenger. To the company’s credit, it does have safety guidelines in place for passengers to minimize risk, namely to verify the make, model and license plate of the vehicle that pulls up to make sure it matches the description on the app. Drivers have less protection. Perhaps the best precaution that can be taken is for both the driver and the passenger to state each others’s names before beginning the ride. Apart from that, there is little to stop a potential robber from entering an Uber vehicle at bar close and mugging the driver once out of site. As ridesharing grows in popularity, these vulnerabilities will only become more apparent to criminals, and robberies will increase accordingly.
However, to acknowledge that crimes in Uber vehicles will increase along with the service’s popularity is not to argue that drivers should be armed with guns to protect themselves. More research needs to be done to assess the effectiveness of other safety measures that have already been implemented to reduce taxi robberies, such as cashless policies, partitions, and cameras. One glimmer of hope: A 2014 study published in Crime Science Journal reported that the number of taxi driver homicides dropped to zero in five cities after a mandate requiring security cameras installed in all cabs.
Is it absurd to require dash cams in all Ubers? Maybe. Then again, five years ago it was absurd to imagine a drunk girl would jump into a strange man’s car at bar close and trust him to take her home safely. Perhaps it still should be.