Whipped Cream Difficulties

Two stories by way of Lawrence:

This odd one about a scientist who works for the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas trying to stop approval of a $20 million dollar grant to Rice University and M.D. Anderson. Lawrence sent it to me and asked if I could make heads or tails out of it; I think I can, but it seems to me to be one of those HouChron stories that’s like a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

I’m not sure if this has been on FARK yet, but since Lawrence sent it to me, I’m linking to it anyway as part of the “Art, damn it! Art!” watch: a 200-foot-long knitted rabbit on the side of an Italian mountain.

The NYT has a story I find kind of odd about the NYPD Accident Investigations Squad.  Basically, the AIS investigates traffic accidents: “But they do so only in cases of death or when a victim is deemed likely to die.”
The problem, according to the NYT, is that AIS sometimes doesn’t investigate accidents where the victim is not immediately dead; if the person dies days later, evidence may be “lost”.

I have two problems with this, both related to the incident the NYT cites:

1. “That delay, Mr. Stevens said, meant that most of the evidence from the crash — skid marks and surveillance video, witness accounts, and alcohol in the driver’s bloodstream — had been lost.” How was it lost? The way I read that sentence, the AIS started to collect the data, then stopped because the victim was still alive (she died three days later). Did they throw away what they had already collected? That seems like an…odd choice, to say the least.
2. Reinforcing point 1 is the fact that the NYT is able to report that the driver in the accident had a 0.07 BAC. So at least some evidence was preserved. “Felony charges were considered…” What felony charges? 0.07 is below the legal limit, as far as I know. And “those charges were dropped because the police testing equipment had not been properly calibrated”. Uh-huh. That’s certainly interesting, and I wish the NYT had gone into more detail on the calibration issue.

Edited to add: It occurs to me that some folks might be as confused as I was by the NYT references to the Highway Patrol and the NYPD. The state of New York does have a state police agency, the New York State Police (whose website is currently broken, it seems). There is also a group within the NYPD called the Highway Patrol “primarily responsible for patrolling and maintaining traffic safety on limited-access highways within New York City.” So it isn’t a statewide police agency in the Broderick Crawford sense, but a confusingly named NYPD division. Got it.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2012 at 9:05 am and is filed under Art, Clippings, Cops, Geek, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.