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| "Uber's Approach to Safety" |
Uber said on Thursday that it had reports of 3,045 sexual assaults during its rides in the United States in 2018, with nine people murdered and 58 killed in crashes, in its first study detailing unsafe incidents on the ride-hailing platform. —The New York Times, December 5, 2019
Atop Uber’s report
about 3,045 sexual assaults
by its drivers is a photo of two
beautiful women
customers, one
clad in a sleeveless
dress, bare legs, the other in tight
denim jeans, bare midriff. Of course, Uber-
employed drivers would be
enticed to rape
female riders, to
fuck or fondle them if they
get into cars wearing revealing
get-ups like that. Spoiler alert:
hip-app swipe of Uber equals the
hazards of hitchhiking. But,
it’s just a fraction of 1.3 billion rides
in 2018, company spokesmen
jaw their jargon of
justification.
Kind of ironic,
keen of Uber’s
legal team to
let this disclosure drop
mid-impeachment
media mayhem when
news watchers would be focused on
notorious nuggets
other than the apparently now common
occurrence of
passengers assaulted by
predators who supposedly passed
quasi-background checks, drivers who
quietly waited behind wheels
ready for
ride-hailers who
trusted a company
to take them
somewhere
safely. 3,045 in one year
unwittingly became
Uber’s
victims of lack of
vigilance.
“What it says is that Uber is a reflection of the society it serves,” is Tony
West’s (Uber’s chief legal officer) way to
(e)xcuse,
explain away, exonerate, shrug
your concerns off,
“yes, but” your fears, your outrage at their
zest for profit, their lack of
zealous background checks in the first place
Susan Vespoli is a poet/writer who splits her time between Arizona and Washington state and who will no longer use Uber as part of her transport equation. Her work has been published in spots such as Rattle, Mom Egg Review, Nasty Women Poets, TheNewVerse.News, and Nailed Magazine.