The Sex Offender Registry Failed Them: Uber Passenger Raped by Driver

Yesterday, a driver for the popular ride-share program, Uber, was arrested in Fort Myers after allegedly raping a passenger. Apparently he’s not the only Uber driver to commit a sex offense.

A few years back, the app-based service and it’s largest competitor, Lyft, were plagued by complaints of sexual assaults at the hands of it’s drivers. To address the problem, on May 9, 2017, Florida’s then Governor Rick Scott signed into law HB 221, also known as the “Uber/Lyft Bill” which REQUIRED these “Transportation Network Companies” to screen each driver to make sure the person is not a match in the National Sex Offender Public Website maintained by the US Department of Justice. The same laws were instituted nationwide and the companies themselves instituted policies to do comprehensive background checks, including specifically screening out anyone on the sex offender registry.

That should have solved the problem, right? Wrong! According to a press release from a class action law firm that filed a lawsuit earlier this year, even in 2020, during height of the the COVID Pandemic, when ridership was at it’s lowest in years, there were about 1000 sexual assaults. How can that be? They are screening against the sex offender registry! It’d be one thing if one or two slipped in, but a thousand? Impossible!

Either Uber is not doing their job and checking the registry, or the registry is not doing its job in screening out perpetrators of sex offenses! If it’s the latter, the sex offender registry completely failed these riders.

But wait… wasn’t this completely predictable? At least it was for us. We posted this four years ago and guess what? We still have sexual assaults in Ubers but we don’t have jobs! A lot of good the registry did, huh?

 


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15 thoughts on “The Sex Offender Registry Failed Them: Uber Passenger Raped by Driver

  • December 8, 2022

    It’s funny I was a so from 1988 I was given my chauffeurs permit from the police chief of our town I drove cab for about 5 years there was never so much as a speculation to my honesty or integrity never a customer who I made to feel uncomfortable being in the car with me. But yet according to big brother I shouldn’t be allowed to drive a cab now. The registry did its job , it took my being a candidate to be hired again away . ( I had left the job to pursue another line of work that didn’t work out). Way to go registry!! My family can’t eat unless my wife worked 2 jobs , then when she had enough she left me so I’m alone homeless and can’t eat see the registry works!!! Here’s your sighn

    Reply
    • December 8, 2022

      Remember that the AZ registry has existed since before these victims were even born! Why weren’t they protected??

      Reply
  • December 8, 2022

    There is no position, no social situation, and no economic status can rise enough above our fallen nature to preclude these acts from happening. Sexual crime, like all other criminal acts, will permeate every facet of our culture regardless of our human attempts to eradicate it. There are not monsters lurking in the bushes – we, collectively, are the “monsters”.

    We cannot wield pitchforks and axes in hopes of removing the stain of crime from society, because the darkness lies within each of us. If we are true with ourselves, we intuitively know where the answer lies, but people by nature reject it. There is only one who was ever perfect, but we were too jealous to receive what he taught, so we hung him on a tree.

    Reply

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