A Step Forward for the N.Y.P.D. and (Truly) Sentient Citizens The safety of New York streets has been a widely discussed topic of late - in conversations both bracing and absurd. In the latter category, we witnessed Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, claim, in all seriousness, that in current-day New York "every citizen knew, who was in any way sentient, that the most important danger in the city is not the yellow cabs, it's the cyclists." It's a puzzling statement, made more puzzling by the fact that she said this immediately after she had been presented (by her sympathetic interviewer, no less) with the following statistic, originally noted by City Journal: "For nearly four years, no pedestrian has died underneath a bike in New York, while 597 have been killed by cars and trucks." It's unclear how this 597-to-0 score nonetheless led to an upset victory by the cyclists, in Rabinowitz's mind at least, in the Most Important Danger In The City Bowl. Rabinowitz's statements were widely ridiculed and would simply be lamentable if not for recurring recent news items like this one, in which 8 pedestrians and bystanders were injured by a car that jumped the curb in the East Village, possibly as a result of drunken drag-racing. Thankfully, there are others in the city who are taking vehicular injuries more seriously - notably the N.Y.P.D. I highly recommend this excellent Times report on the recently renamed and revamped Collision Investigation Squad, which is tasked with unraveling the circumstances around the city's deadly car crashes. The article is full of great, gritty glimpses into this world, including this quote: "'On the midnight, you get a lot of speed," Detective Robert Saporito said. It also expertly chronicles the compelling mix of traditional police work, physics equations and advanced robotics required to investigate these incidents. And it explains how the N.Y.P.D."s approach to investigating crashes changed crucially in the wake of a lawsuit over a pedestrian death. Basically, the previous policy was to launch a criminal investigation only if the crash involved a fatality - which meant that, if the critically injured died days after the crash (as happened in the case of the lawsuit), investigators were left to follow an investigative trail gone cold. Now the Collision Investigation Squad is involved whenever someone is listed by a paramedic as being in critical condition. Also telling is the unit's new name: previously, the officers who investigated these crashes did so under the title of Accident Investigation Squad - a nomenclature that suggested an institutional willingness to consider fatal crashes as unavoidable happenstance. That's no longer the case, in both name and action - something for which every sentient citizen should be grateful.