On Saturday, a man in Michigan opened fire on three separate
occasions, ultimately killing six people and wounding two. It turns out the guy
was an Uber driver, and the majority of headlines about the incident have made reference to that
fact. Predictably, the resulting media scuttlebutt included comments about Uber’s
screening process, and Uber itself issued a statement defending its hiring
practices.
It’s not at all uncommon for people to follow an unfortunate
incident with “I’ll never do that again.” Got food poisoning at a restaurant?
You’ll never go there again. The airline lost your luggage? You’ll never fly
that airline again. And clearly, there’s some logic to it. Obviously, when
something is unsatisfactory, one way to express such dissatisfaction is by “voting
with your feet,” i.e., ceasing use of the product.
It’s different, though, when one has a bad experience with
something one knows. Shit happens, and if a reliable service screws something
up once, that’s not necessarily an indication of an irredeemable decline in
quality. In fact, sometimes one incident off the rails makes it less likely that a similar incident will
happen again as the organization seeks to plug any perceived holes about its process.
I conducted an informal poll among my associates this
morning about whether they’d change their Uber habits after
Saturday’s shootings. I’m pleased to say that one hundred percent of the
respondents said they wouldn’t. The only person who said she wouldn’t use Uber
after Saturday didn’t use it anyway because she already had suspicions.
Indeed, Uber has reasonably pointed out that, since the
shooter had no criminal history at all, there was no background check or
process that would have revealed that he was a danger. Short of ordering a
complete psychological work-up of any applicant, a process which is surely too
burdensome to expect (and again not at all a guarantee of identifying the
danger), I don’t see a reasonable way that Uber itself could have prevented
this incident.
I am not a champion for Uber. I don't use it but I have
no objection to it; I’ve been an Uber passenger with others before and I
once took an Uber called by a Good Samaritan to the emergency room when I
crashed my bike and broke my hand. I simply remain resistant to downloading
apps, and the times I haven’t been able to walk, bike, or take transit to where
I have to go, I’ve simply hailed a cab. For a progressive I’m awfully resistant
to changing my habits.
It doesn’t much matter
to me whether this incident sinks Uber or not, but it frustrates me when people
knee-jerk react to things like this rather than rationally evaluating what the
true implications are. Most Uber drivers, like most people, are likely decent
individuals. Most people selling items on Craigslist are honest. Most people using
dating services are just looking for a nice person to go out with. It’s impossible
to weed out every possible risk on these platforms, just
as it is in the real world.
In fact, the people put in the greatest danger in Kalamazoo
on Saturday were those who might’ve had nothing to do with Uber at all. The
gunman didn’t shoot his own passengers; it seems the safest place to be in
Kalamazoo during this shooting spree was this guy’s Uber.
Terrible shit happens in the world. A terrible thing could
happen to any individual, even if that person does absolutely everything as
safely as is possible. Obviously the consequences of this particular brand of “unlucky”
were horrible. It would be more horrible, though, to stop living because of
what “might” happen.
