In 2006, when Jessie Singer was twenty-three, her partner was struck by a car and killed while riding his bicycle in New York City. They called it an accident, but the driver who took Eric Ng’s life was convicted of a crime and sent to jail. Still, they called it an accident.
People hit by cars are commonly blamed for what happened.
Ng was killed not because of factors out of anyone’s control (“My car hit this person,” the driver told police, which, Singer notes, sounds as though he wasn’t even there) or even due to human error. It happened because nothing was done to find and fix the root causes of what occurred, including a transportation system that routinely pits fast cars against vulnerable bicyclists and pedestrians.
Singer, senior editor for the publication Transportation Alternatives and editor-in-chief of Reclaim magazine, tells Ng’s story along with many others in her illuminating new book, There Are No Accidents, published in February by Simon and Schuster. The book’s subtitle, The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price, gives some sense of its scope.
Singer argues that our tendencies toward calling things “accidents”—affixing blame onto victims when pedestrians, workers, gun owners, drug users, and others are injured or killed— keeps us from taking actions that could prevent these things from happening. It recognizes that a person’s chances of getting hurt or killed often depends more on their skin color, economic status, or zip code than whether they were taking foolish risks or not paying attention.
Terms like “accident-prone worker,” “jaywalker,” “the nut behind the wheel,” and “careless and improper handling of firearms” are used to deflect blame on to victims, rather than on correctable vulnerabilities.
People hit by cars are commonly blamed for what happened (“Pedestrians often appear stupid or careless, and lots of them are,” declared a 1923 pamphlet from the Automotive Club of America), just as fault is routinely ascribed to deaths caused by car crashes that road saftety improvements could have prevented. Seniors are told to watch their step and not fall rather than being taught how to fall in a way that minimizes the potential for injury.
One favorite tactic by businesses is to produce employee safety handbooks with often impossible-to-follow workplace rules. So when deaths and injuries occur, they can be blamed on employee misbehavior instead of workplace hazards. (Singer notes wryly that this contrasts sharply with the usual corporate preference for “a world without rules and regulations.”)
“This book is full of powerful people who say ‘it was an accident’ to keep making money, to avoid admitting fault, and to not have to be accountable for the people they kill and injure,” Singer writes. “In so many cases, ‘it was an accident’ is a phrase that absolves powerful people of responsibility for dangerous conditions. And these people allow accidents to happen again and again.”
As Singer sees it, those who blame individuals for accidents are “almost always drawing attention away from the systems that allowed the death and injury, and the vast potential for prevention.” The purpose of There Are No Accidents is to shift the focus back to root causes.
Singer notes that being a railroad worker was once one of the most dangerous jobs in the nation, with some 11,000 workers dying while connecting train cars in 1892 alone. Passage of the Safety Appliance Act requiring railroad companies to use automatic couplers brought that number down to 2,000 per year over the next two decades.
Passage of worker’s compensation laws in the 1910s, which required companies to incur costs when workers are maimed or killed on the job, led to sweeping improvements in workplace safety. Design improvements like seatbelts and airbags, enacted over the vociferous objections of the automobile industry, have also saved countless lives. And the threat of lawsuits, more than fear of regulators, has prompted companies to make their products and operations safer.
Still, the number of U.S. deaths recorded as accidents, Singer says, has risen sharply in recent years, from about 95,000 in 1986 to more than 160,000 in 2016. She attributes this to deregulation and the passage of laws designed to lower liability awards to amounts that can be written off as a cost of doing business.
Racism is a constant factor. People of color are more likely to be exposed to toxins in the environment, work dangerous jobs, be misdiagnosed or have their pain disregarded by medical professionals, and be blamed for causing their own injuries due to carelessness and lawbreaking. Nine of the top ten U.S. counties with the highest accident rates are majority Indigenous.
Black people who accidentally kill white people face stiffer penalties than vice versa. Ninety-nine percent of the citations issued by New York City police in the first three months of 2020 went to Black and Latinx people.
Rather than naming and blaming, Singer calls for the focus to be on prevention and corrective action: “Where you can, point back to what can actually change the trajectory of any given accident.”
For Singer, and many others who have lost loved ones to “accidents,” it’s personal. Toward the end of the book, she writes a remembrance for Eric Ng, with his “great hair and big muscles,” his musical talent, his courage in protesting war and injustice, his work as a math teacher at a middle school in Brooklyn, and his magnetism and kindness. She mentions in a footnote that these few paragraphs were the ones she worked the hardest on, and still came away “feeling that I failed to meet the breadth of his worth.”
But it is a touching tribute, in a worthy book.