Violence Against Cabbies
What keeps coming up now as we research and continue getting more feedback from cabbies is the amount of violence cabbies deal with. K. Weiszhaar from The Taxi News brought this up in his post regarding our project:
“What is the overall goal of this project? What piques your interest in taxi drivers and/or the taxi industry. I used to try to keep track of taxi homicides in Latin America. I just didn’t have the time. Right now I have 2198 alerts in my alert box. That’s just since July 2008. Probably about 10% of those are homicides. There is no city in the English speaking world that compares to the violence against taxi drivers in countries such as Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. Caracas, Venezuela and it’s suburbs have to be the most dangerous place on Earth to drive a taxicab.”
The topic of poverty comes up in these countres:
“I think that extreme poverty plus a breakdown in social order along with corrupt political officials have more to do with crime against taxi drivers in those Central and South American countries than the climate. If your theory is true, why is the driver homicide rate so much higher in Caracas than Mumbai? Why is the crime rate in Gary, Indiana higher that Ft. Worth, Texas? I’ll bet that the rate of Spanish speaking people in Ft. Worth exceeds the rate of Spanish speaking people in Gary.”