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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