Last week, Streetsblog reported that NYPD had released a detailed description of how the crash unfolded, supposedly based on security video from a business located at 157 Morgan Avenue. But the footage NYPD gave the Lefevre family does not convey the same details as the descriptions of video in the police investigative file.

Here is the description of a security video from 157 Morgan submitted by Detective Gerard Sheehan. It delves into specific detail about the crash:

Here are two videos captured from 157 Morgan that NYPD gave to the Lefevres and their attorney, Steve Vaccaro, showing footage at the intersection immediately before Leonardo Degianni, who fatally struck Lefevre and then left the scene, turned on to Meserole Street. In the first clip, the crane truck operated by Degianni enters the frame at about the 4:50 mark, and a cyclist is briefly visible at about the 5:02 mark. In the second clip, the truck enters the frame slightly after the 6:50 mark. In neither video is the moment Degianni struck Lefevre plainly visible.

Adding to the discrepancies, a second police description of security video does not match Sheehan’s description or the videos in the investigative file. The description from Detective Sheehan says that Lefevre was initially struck by the “passenger right side” of Degianni’s truck, which threw him “into the roadway” before Degianni struck him again. A second description, from officer Armand Tasca, says Lefevre “rode directly into the side of the truck as it made the right turn” (note that both Sheehan and Tasca wrote that Degianni and Lefevre were traveling north on Morgan, when they were in fact traveling south — see crash diagram at the end of this post):

“The FOIL documents raise more questions than they answer,” said Vaccaro. Even with a close viewing of the videos posted here — two of the four released by NYPD — it’s impossible to corroborate NYPD’s version of how the collision unfolded. (The third video shows the truck traveling on Meserole Street, leaving behind what appears to be Lefevre’s bike mid-block, and the fourth video shows Degianni parking the crane truck, then driving away in another vehicle.)

NYPD’s public information office has not responded to Streetsblog’s request to speak with Detective Sheehan about the discrepancy between the videos and the descriptions of the videos in the investigative file.

On January 27, Vaccaro demanded that NYPD certify that he and the Lefevres have received accurate copies of all videos in the department’s possession. He has not yet received a response. “The NYPD’s account of the crash doesn’t hold water, unless there is video or other evidence they are withholding,” Vaccaro says.

Diagram of the crash from NYPD’s investigative file:

Videos from 157 Morgan Avenue as NYPD submitted to the Lefevres and Vaccaro:

Craig Esswein, chief of the vehicular crimes bureau, told Streetsblog that reviewing deadly traffic crashes is standard procedure. “Any time there’s a fatality the NYPD does their investigation, and we do our own.”

Lefevre’s death at the hands of a hit-and-run truck driver in Williamsburg last October has made headlines, owing to revelations that NYPD withheld details of the crash from the victim’s family and failed to gather evidence at the scene. Asked about NYPD’s handling of the investigation, Esswein said, “We will be looking into the matter.”

Though no photos of the scene have been released to the Lefevre family — police reportedly didn’t take pictures due to a broken camera — Esswein says they do exist. He says those pictures will be examined along with video of the collision, which according to NYPD records shows that the truck driver dragged Lefevre and his bike for several yards as he made an unsignaled right-hand turn. “We’re going to review it all,” said Esswein.

In a statement issued this week, Mathieu’s mother Erika Lefevre revealed that NYPD has charged the driver, identified by police as Leonardo Degianni, for failure to signal and failure to exercise due care. To date, no charges have been issued for the victim’s death, or for leaving the scene of a fatal crash. “We urge the Kings County District Attorney’s Office to carefully review this case,” wrote Lefevre, “and bring appropriate charges.”

Lefevre’s family and friends have launched a letter-writing campaign to Hynes’ office asking for a careful review of the case. More information is available here.

Police retrieved a video recording of the moment Leonardo Degianni struck Mathieu Lefevre with his truck only after the Lefevre family held a demonstration in front of NYPD headquarters and sent a letter protesting the department's handling of the case.

The hit-and-run truck driver who killed cyclist Mathieu Lefevre last October struck the victim with his front driver’s side tire, according to a description in NYPD’s investigative file shared by Lefevre’s family. The description, based largely on video evidence police obtained in December, raises serious questions about the driver’s claim that he was not aware he had struck Lefevre when he left the scene of the fatal collision.

Police released the investigative file on Friday, three weeks after Lefevre’s family filed a suit under the Freedom of Information Law to obtain materials related to the investigation.

In a statement released today [PDF], Erika Lefevre, the victim’s mother, revealed that NYPD has now issued traffic summonses to the crane truck driver, Leonardo Degianni, for failure to exercise due care and failing to signal, but no criminal charges. The statement criticizes NYPD for not charging Degianni with fleeing the scene and criminal negligence, given evidence that Degianni’s front bumper and driver’s side front wheel struck Mathieu Lefevre. The Lefevres are appealing to Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes to review the case.

The Lefevre case has shed light on an aspect of policing that NYPD is loath to conduct transparently. Police and press accounts of traffic fatalities tend to be riddled with gaps, and witness accounts from crash scenes often depict police failing to pursue potential lines of inquiry. Thanks to the Lefevres’ determined pursuit of the truth, the public not only has a better sense of what caused Mathieu Lefevre’s death, but how NYPD conducts crash investigations.

Evidence in the Lefevre file summarized by their attorney, Steve Vaccaro, directly contradicts at least one NYPD account of the crash, in which a police source said the victim ran a red light. The NYPD file indicates that Lefevre and Degianni were passing through the intersection of Meserole Street and Morgan Avenue simultaneously, with a green light, when Degianni turned across Lefevre’s path, without signaling, as the cyclist continued straight.

The new evidence is only coming to light after the victim’s family relentlessly pressed the NYPD to disclose information related to the crash.

NYPD records, as summarized by Vaccaro, show that in October police thought they had all the video evidence available. They had one video that did not capture the moment of impact, but showed Lefevre’s body being “ejected” by the truck, Vaccaro said. In early December, NYPD told the Lefevres that the video evidence was inconclusive.

Only after a rally at NYPD headquarters and the Lefevres’ much-reported search for information did police obtain the video showing the initial impact, collected from a Morgan Avenue shopkeeper on December 18. Vaccaro did his own canvassing and found several other businesses that had video. The day after the shopkeeper on Morgan Avenue provided his tape to NYPD, he told Vaccaro’s firm that he’d watched the video and found it disturbing.

The substantial time lag before NYPD obtained crucial video evidence is one misstep in a general pattern of carelessness on the part of police investigators. According to the NYPD file, police did not have functioning cameras to record critical blood evidence at the scene of the crash. While Vaccaro says the officer assigned to the case, Detective Gerard Sheehan, told him that blood and paint were found on the front bumper of Degianni’s truck, the investigative file omits that specific evidence, making only a general reference to blood found on the truck.

A document from the NYPD investigative file indicates that the camera used to record blood evidence at the scene of Mathieu Lefevre's death was not working properly. While a detective told the Lefevre family's lawyer that blood was found on the truck's front bumper, the investigative file does not include such specific information about blood evidence.

Police are certainly reviving their tough-on-cyclists PR campaign, bragging to the Post earlier this week about the 19th Precinct’s bike enforcement prowess on the Upper East Side. Meanwhile, the message to motorists remains the same: If you’re sober and stay at the scene, you can do just about anything, like run over and kill a 12-year-old girl who stopped in a crosswalk to retrieve her backpack, and not face repercussions.

By leaking their cyclist summonsing stats to the Post, the police at least made it a little easier to highlight their skewed priorities. As reader Chris O’Leary pointed out this morning, the 19th Precinct issued 2,436 tickets for failing to stop at traffic signals in 2011 [PDF]. Apparently, nearly half of those tickets — 1,101, according to the Post — were handed out to cyclists.

Police are devoting all these resources to cyclist enforcement on streets where disproportionate numbers of New Yorkers get maimed by motor vehicles. Community District 8, which roughly overlaps the 19th Precinct on the Upper East Side, has the third-highest rate of injury-causing traffic crashes in the city.

Here’s what the precinct’s enforcement priorities look like out on the street, according to an account from reader Albert Ahronheim:

At about 1:50 on the afternoon of January 7, as I was walking on First Avenue by 81st Street, I noticed four police “three-wheeled scooters” and four police motorcycles completely straddling the bicycle lane, and eight police milling around, a couple of them writing, most just gabbing and laughing, while there were plenty of empty parking spaces they could have easily moved into. At least one cyclist I saw had to veer out into car traffic to get around what seemed to be a completely unnecessary blockage of basically a whole block. But a run-of-the-mill police blockage of the bike lane isn’t why I’m writing.

I was standing around trying to get up the nerve to ask eight cops to vacate the bike lane as long as whatever threat was over, when an elderly man with a walker, who’d been watching also, started talking to me. He told me that all these police were “just to give a ticket to a bicyclist.”  I asked him if he knew what the cyclist had been ticketed for, and he said he didn’t know — he just saw him ride away afterwards. The man with the walker told me, “I don’t care what he was doing, it takes so many cops just to give a cyclist a ticket?” When he mentioned all the real mayhem on the streets, I told him how NYPD routinely lets motorists kill without filing charges, and he wholeheartedly agreed that they’re failing to protect people.

So then I went up to one of the cops and politely asked what all the excitement was about. He paused, like he was trying to figure out how to tell me just enough to satisfy me, and said, “Uh, we just had somebody stopped — that’s about it.” Then I said, “It would be great if they’d not be blocking the bike lane if nothing is going on,” to which he politely replied, “We’ll be done in a few minutes and be out of your way.”  Only later did I realize that, since I wasn’t on a bicycle at the time and had just gone around a car and walked up to him from the curb, he must have thought I was a driver who needed to get through the bike lane and out of a parking space. After a couple more minutes they all drove away.

Peter Vallone Jr.

The Village Voice reports that Peter Vallone, chair of the City Council’s public safety committee, is planning a hearing on traffic enforcement.

Responding to the Transportation Alternatives probe into how NYPD handles crash investigations, announced after a year that saw reckless motorists face little to no repercussions for taking lives, Vallone said, “They have some legitimate concerns. Clearly, more has to be done.”

Accepting Vallone’s statement at face value — that his committee will indeed focus on pedestrian and cyclist safety, rather than personal gripes — this is welcome news. Here are a few questions we’d like to see the Vallone committee ask the brass at NYPD:

• Is the Accident Investigation Squad dispatched to all cases involving death or serious injury? If not, why not?
• Why must victims’ families resort to the courts to obtain information pertaining to fatal crashes?
• Why isn’t NYPD making use of new state laws intended to hold dangerous drivers accountable for injuring and killing vulnerable street users?
• Does NYPD track rates of traffic violations, the same way it tracks other crime? If not, why not? If so, where is the data?

With mainstream media outlets picking up the story of Mathieu Lefevre’s family suing to get information from NYPD, and papers including the Voice questioning how so many deaths and injuries can go unpunished, might the council finally be ready to address the shortcomings of the city’s traffic justice system? We’ll see if Peter Vallone will pick up the slack for his colleague James Vacca.

The family of Mathieu Lefevre has filed a lawsuit against the NYPD for refusing to release information related to the hit-and-run collision that killed the 30-year-old Brooklyn cyclist last October.

According to the complaint, filed in New York State Supreme Court on December 30 [PDF], NYPD denied a freedom of information request from Lefevre’s parents seeking records pertaining to the crash, on the grounds that the investigation is ongoing. The Lefevres appealed, citing their belief that the records in question are not exempt from disclosure under the law. NYPD failed to respond, effectively denying the appeal.

NYPD routinely denies access to information on deadly crashes, often based on the claim that releasing even the most rudimentary details would jeopardize crash investigations. The Lefevre lawsuit challenges that practice, based in part on the fact that NYPD has declared that no charges will be filed for Mathieu’s death.

The summary of the lawsuit, filed on behalf of the Lefevres by attorney Steve Vaccaro of Rankin & Taylor, reads in part:

NYPD admits that it possesses records requested by the Lefevres, but has stonewalled for nearly two months, refusing to disclose those records without a valid justification. The two grounds advanced by NYPD for withholding the records are completely lacking in merit.

First, NYPD asserts that it can withhold all records concerning Lefevre’s death, so long as its investigation of his death is still open. That is incorrect. FOIL exempts from disclosure only records the release of which would interfere with an ongoing investigation. NYPD does not suggest even the possibility of such interference.

Second, NYPD asserts that release of records concerning Lefevre’s death would jeopardize an impartial trial or adjudication. But NYPD has already announced there will be no criminal charges related to Lefevre’s death. Absent criminal charges, there is no right to a trial by jury, and therefore no chance of a tainted adjudication.

In December Vaccaro sent a letter to NYPD indicating that, according to officers involved in the case, the department’s Accident Investigation Squad has all but concluded that the truck driver who hit Lefevre, identified in the crash report as Leonardo Degianni, was unaware of the collision. The letter also points to conflicting accounts of the collision from NYPD, and says Vaccaro was told that the AIS lost vital evidence. (Disclosure: Vaccaro represented Streetsblog for our freedom of information request to obtain documents from CUNY related to the effort to erase the Prospect Park West bike lane.)

“The Lefevres seek only to learn the truth about the death of their son,” reads the suit summary. “NYPD’s stated reasons for hiding the truth from the Lefevres plainly lack merit.”

New York Times coverage of the crash that killed Mathieu Lefevre offered readers a rare look at an NYPD deeply biased against victims of traffic violence. Photo: Robert Stolarik/NYT

When Brooklyn cyclist Mathieu Lefevre was killed by a hit-and-run driver in October, NYPD initially told the media that Lefevre had run a red light and that he was riding in the truck driver’s blind spot. The NYPD crash report contradicts both those claims, yet the department’s final public statement on the case may well be “There’s no criminality. That’s why they call it an accident.”

Rasha Shamoon was riding her bike home in the early morning hours of August 5, 2008 when she was struck by the driver of a Range Rover at Bowery and Delancey. Shamoon, 31, was an experienced cyclist whose bike was covered with reflective tape and equipped with front and rear lights. Limiting witness interviews to the driver, who at 21 had amassed a record of six traffic convictions, and his two passengers, NYPD faulted Shamoon for the crash.

In November 2009, 22-year-old Seth Kahn was killed by a bus driver while crossing Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. Police at first told reporters that Kahn was running to beat the light when he was crushed by the rear wheels of the turning bus. Days later, however, bus driver Jeremy Philhower was ticketed for failing to yield. Almost a year after the crash it was determined that Philhower, who had a history of texting behind the wheel and had reportedly posted comments on Facebook about his desire to kill people, was driving too fast and not looking where he was going.

In the immediate aftermath of any single crash, it’s impossible to tell whether NYPD has sufficient cause to exonerate the driver. The department won’t release details from investigations and withholds crash reports from public scrutiny. But when the data from those reports is compiled by the New York State DOT and vetted by researchers, the cumulative picture debunks the NYPD’s blame-the-victim-first protocol.

The most comprehensive analysis of crash reports is inside the 2010 NYC DOT pedestrian safety report, which examined crashes in which pedestrians died or suffered serious injuries from 2002 to 2006. Among the crashes to which contributing factors were assigned, only 21.5 percent placed primary responsibility on “pedestrian error/confusion.” The vast majority were caused by driver behavior, including inattention (a factor in 36 percent of crashes), failure to yield (27 percent), and excessive speed (20 percent).

Since drivers are culpable for most crashes that hurt pedestrians, this should add up to hundreds if not thousands of cases each year where police and prosecutors file charges for reckless or negligent driving. In 2006, for example, 143 pedestrians died on city streets and 1,313 were severely injured. That doesn’t count less serious pedestrian injuries, which number in the thousands annually.

But as Transportation Alternatives noted in October, NYPD has failed to make use of new state laws intended to hold dangerous motorists accountable. Applications of VTL 1146, the statute that was strengthened last fall to make “careless driving” the default charge when pedestrians or cyclists are injured, have stayed pretty much the same for the last three-and-a-half years, with this year’s total citations on track to remain in the double digits.

So not only is there a huge mismatch between what actually causes crashes and what NYPD feeds the media, the department is as a rule letting drivers off the hook for inflicting death and serious injury.

If only NYPD targeted the most dangerous intersections with similar vigor. Streetfilms’ Clarence Eckerson and Streetsblog publisher Mark Gorton went out to Canal and Lafayette, which saw 13 crashes in the month of August alone, to see how traffic is being policed. Here’s what they found.

Deputy Inspector Michael M. Kemper is in charge of Brooklyn's 90th Precinct, where Mathieu Lefevre was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

Having flown in from Canada after learning of their son’s death, Mathieu’s parents Erika and Alain went to the city morgue to view his remains. There, they were told by a detective to go to the station house for a copy of the crash report and to pick up Mathieu’s belongings. Here’s what happened next:

The 90th Precinct station house proved to be a House of No, as Ms. Lefevre described it: the family was told at the desk that there was no detective available to speak with them, that Mr. Lefevre’s property was not there and that no report on the accident was available.

So they waited.

“After some time elapsed, I called the detective at the morgue, who had given us her phone number in case we ran into problems,” Ms. Lefevre said. Eventually, a detective in the 90th Precinct explained that the person handling the investigation of their son’s death would not be back for several days. “The detective we saw said he had no access to the information, that they do not share files,” Ms. Lefevre said.

After four hours, she said, they left.

It took a week for the Lefevres to claim Mathieu’s effects — though according to the Times they were at the station house all along — and almost two weeks to obtain a copy of the crash report, which conflicted with NYPD statements to the media and has generated more questions than answers.

The most enraging aspect of NYPD’s mishandling of the Lefevre case is that there is nothing unusual about it. We can’t say it any better than Streetsblog commenter Media Maven, who writes: “The way the NYPD is treating the Lefevres is standard operating procedure. This isn’t a particularly bad case. It’s entirely normal. Virtually all ped and cyclist fatalities are treated as ‘accidents’ and blamed on the victim. The drivers who did the killing are rarely investigated or brought to justice. Getting information about the circumstances of the killing out of the NYPD is almost impossible unless you can afford a lawyer who is really willing and able to go after it.” Witness, for example, the detective who handed the Lefevres an attorney’s business card, knowing the swamp they were about to wade into.

Neither Ray Kelly nor Michael Bloomberg has shown any interest in improving the NYPD’s record of tactless bungling when it comes to traffic fatalities, but there is a way for ordinary citizens to demand change from the ground up. Every month, each precinct holds a community council meeting. I’ve been to a few of these, and it’s a tremendous opportunity to talk directly to the cops who are responsible for your neighborhood (as well as local electeds, who are often on hand). It might be easy for a faceless spokesperson to dismiss a tragic death with a callous remark like “That’s why they call it an accident,” but in my experience the police take very seriously the concerns of those who make time to come out on a weeknight and address them face to face.

The commanding officer of the 90th Precinct is Deputy Inspector Michael M. Kemper. The 90th Precinct community council meets on the second Wednesday of each month at 30 Montrose Avenue, Community Room, at 7:30 p.m. Streetsblog has confirmed that the next meeting will take place as scheduled, one week from today, on December 14.

Singer Daniela D'Ercole was struck and killed by a driver on the Upper West Side last month. NYPD did not respond by stepping up enforcement of speeding and other dangerous traffic infractions. Photo: DNAinfo/David Torres

Now that NYPD has shown a willingness to respond to crashes with targeted enforcement, here are some other locations where police might want to devote some resources:

• Eastern Parkway near Bergen Street in Brooklyn, where the Reverend Theauther Love, 87, was struck and killed during his morning walk last month.
• Hillside Avenue near 198th Street in Queens, where a motorist killed Queens Civic Congress President Pat Dolan as she was walking to a community board meeting two weeks ago.
• Fifth Avenue and 65th Street in Manhattan, where this October an 86-year-old grandmother walking in the crosswalk was run over and killed by a turning tow truck driver who failed to yield.
• Broadway and 106th Street, where a motorist struck and killed Daniela D’Ercole as she exited a cab and crossed the street, the impact reportedly sending her body across multiple lanes of traffic.

Ray Kelly’s NYPD did not respond to these deaths with a display of targeted enforcement to deter dangerous driving. They responded by saying “no criminality” was involved and exonerating the drivers without much of an explanation why. Of the hundreds of other fatalities and thousands of injuries caused by motorists each year in NYC, the overwhelming majority receive a similar non-response from police.

It remains to be seen how many cyclists will be subject to summonses by exceeding the 25 mph Prospect Park speed limit, but it won’t take many for the 78th Precinct to exceed the number of speeding tickets it gives out to motorists. In October, the 78th issued just five summonses for speeding [PDF].

Failure to observe the speed limit is ubiquitous citywide and contributes to hundreds of deaths and life-altering injuries each year. Where is the NYPD response?

Speaking at yesterday’s Transportation Alternatives rally at 1 Police Plaza, Erika Lefevre pointed to inconsistencies between initial accounts of the hit-and-run collision that killed her son Mathieu and the version offered by the crash report, which her family obtained only after weeks of NYPD stonewalling.

The case of Mathieu Lefevre is only the latest in which relatives and friends of traffic crime victims are kept in the dark by a police department with a long record of withholding information regarding cyclist and pedestrian deaths. It does, however, afford a detailed look at NYPD incompetence and obfuscation. For example:

• An NYPD officer told Gothamist that the department “had concluded that Lefevre had run a red light at the intersection.” The glaring flaw in that conclusion is that if both Lefevre and driver Leonardo Degianni were traveling in the same direction, and Lefevre ran a light, presumably Degianni could not have struck Lefevre unless he did the same. Regardless, there is no mention in the crash report of either party running a light.
• The prevailing narrative of the crash, which originated with NYPD, is that Lefevre was riding to the right of Degianni’s commercial truck when Degianni turned into him. The diagram on the crash report seems to depict a rear-end collision, and the officer’s notes say Degianni made the turn after the collision.
• NYPD told the Lefevre family that the truck that hit Mathieu was identified through visible damage, but the vehicle damage codes section of the crash report was marked through, with no details documented.
• On October 24, an NYPD spokesperson told Gothamist: “The driver did not know that he hit the cyclist.” The police report, amended on October 30 with Degianni’s identity (which police would not provide to Gothamist or the Lefevre family), includes no explanation of why Degianni left the scene, or what circumstances led him to run over a person on a bicycle without knowing it.
• NYPD told Erika Lefevre that charges had been dropped against the driver, suggesting that charges were filed at some point. This contradicts a statement, also reported by Gothamist on October 24, that no charges were filed, as well as remarks from a department spokesperson who told Metro: “There’s no criminality. That’s why they call it an accident.”

Inexplicably, even as NYPD refused information to the Lefevres, the department was talking to the media. On October 26, a week after her son was killed, Erika Lefevre told reporters, “All we know is what we have read in the papers.” On Wednesday, Lefevre spoke directly to NYPD.

“Today, I am asking NYPD to stop leaking misinformation to the press about crash victims,” she said. “That only hurts victims and their families and makes NYPD appear unprofessional and biased.” Lefevre said that to this point NYPD has not complied with freedom of information requests and has not permitted her family to see video of the crash and other evidence police say they have.

Transportation Alternatives today delivered over 2,500 citizen letters to Ray Kelly demanding that NYPD crack down on dangerous driving, and announced a comprehensive probe into how the department handles traffic crash investigations.

Flanked by dozens of supporters and victims of traffic violence at 1 Police Plaza, TA executive director Paul Steely White excoriated NYPD for what he called a “cavalier attitude” toward lawless driving. While hundreds are killed and thousands are injured by reckless drivers in the city every year, enforcement of traffic laws is relatively rare, and drivers who cause suffering and death are routinely excused by police and prosecutors without as much as a summons.

“It’s the NYPD’s job to keep dangerous driving in check by holding reckless drivers accountable,” said White, “but they are simply not taking that job seriously.”

Calling for a zero tolerance approach to a “public safety crisis,” TA will have attorneys review NYPD reports on recent crashes that resulted in serious injury or death. Evaluations will focus on whether police followed proper post-crash procedure and if victims were “guaranteed a full and fair investigation.”

Erika Lefevre, whose son Mathieu was killed by a hit-and-run driver while riding his bike in East Williamsburg in October, said that her family is still waiting for definitive information about the crash. Initially, police told reporters that Mathieu ran a red light at Morgan Avenue and Meserole Street and was struck by the driver of a flatbed truck making a right-hand turn. The NYPD report, however, indicates that Mathieu was hit from behind, and makes no mention of either Mathieu or the driver running a light.

The report identifies the driver who struck Lefevre as Leonardo Degianni of College Point. Degianni, 48, was driving a truck registered to Imperium Construction of Ridgewood. After hitting and dragging Lefevre, Degianni left the scene. Police found the truck a short distance from the crash site but did not locate Degianni for days. He was not charged.

Erika Lefevre said police have video of the crash along with other evidence, none of which her family has been allowed to see.

“We appreciate that NYPD has a difficult job in trying to investigate this crash and determine what happened,” said Lefevre. “We want NYPD to take the time it needs to conduct an unbiased, thorough, professional investigation. But NYPD has caused us great pain with the mishandling and withholding of information, and their rush to clear the driver of any wrongdoing.”

Juliana Berger, former wife of Mathieu Lefevre, urged Ray Kelly to beef up the department’s accident investigation squad and to implement targeted enforcement of dangerous behaviors including failure to yield, speeding and failure to exercise due care.

Also speaking at today’s rally was Donna Ganson, whose husband was seriously injured in 2009 by a motorist as he walked his daughter to school in Park Slope. Though witnesses said the driver was traveling some 20 mph over the 30 mph speed limit, and though Ganson’s husband was crossing legally, no charges were filed and no summonses were issued. The collision put the victim in a coma and left him with brain damage.

“My life, his life, and the lives of our three daughters will never be the same,” said Ganson. “How can a speeding driver who hits a pedestrian in a crosswalk in broad daylight not get a ticket for anything?”

Though he was not present for the rally himself, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio sent over a statement, read by spokesperson Wiley Norvell, announcing that his office has asked NYPD for data related to the application of vulnerable user laws and information on when the department deploys the accident investigation squad.

Prospect Park loop, Saturday afternoon.

This was the scene on the Prospect Park loop Saturday afternoon. With two pedestrians having sustained serious injuries in collisions with cyclists on the southwest side of the park over the last six months, NYPD and the Parks Enforcement Patrol set up at the base of the hill where the crashes happened. (The Daily News, in a typical he-said/she-said style piece, claimed credit for the police checkpoint this weekend.)

Heightening awareness of the need to look out for other park users is all to the good. But Doug Gordon at Brooklyn Spoke raised a good question this morning. Namely: Why can’t locations with a history of traffic crashes that cause injuries also get NYPD checkpoints?

It seems like only bike-ped crashes elicit this kind of response from police, while locations where motorists cause fatalities are forgotten as soon as the crash scene is cleared and the NYPD declares that “no criminality is suspected.”

Around the corner from Streetsblog HQ is one of the most crash-prone locations in the city. The intersection of Lafayette and Canal saw 13 crashes and one pedestrian injury in the month of August alone, but I’ve never seen officers on the scene, on the lookout for motorists who fail to yield or run a light. The more common sight is a traffic enforcement agent waving cars and trucks through crosswalks where pedestrians have the signal.

There are thousands of locations in New York City where police could hand out flyers about obeying the speed limit and yielding to pedestrians to drivers stopped at red lights. If NYPD can devote resources to bike-ped conflicts in the Prospect Park loop, why not send a few officers out to the places where people are getting maimed and killed in traffic?

Marilyn Dershowitz and Mathieu Lefevre were killed by hit-and-run drivers who were exonerated by police and prosecutors.

It took days for NYPD to track down the driver of a flatbed truck who ran over Mathieu Lefevre in East Williamsburg on October 18. According to Erika Lefevre, who continues to wait for a full account of her son’s death, police said the truck was found two blocks away, and showed visible damage from the collision. She was also told that charges had been dropped against the driver — whose name she still doesn’t know — though she is doubtful charges were ever filed.

A statement from NYPD in today’s Metro seems to confirm her suspicion.

The driver left the scene — cops told Gothamist that he didn’t know he had hit anyone — and no charges have been filed in the case.

“There’s no criminality,” an NYPD spokesman told Metro. “That’s why they call it an accident.”

The NYPD spokesman quoted in the Metro story is not only startlingly insensitive, revealing the department’s casual attitude toward traffic violence, he’s also playing fast and loose in his interpretation of the law. Whatever caused the collision between the driver and Mathieu Lefevre, it is illegal in New York State to leave the scene of a crash.

According to state traffic code, anyone “knowing or having cause to know that personal injury has been caused to another person” due to a collision is required to stop and notify authorities. Leaving the scene of an incident that results in death is a class D felony punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to seven years in jail.

It appears that the decision to file or not file charges in the Lefevre crash hinged on whether the driver knew he struck the victim. According to Erika Lefevre, NYPD says the driver was “likely unaware” of the collision. For a crash that killed someone, this may be a thin reed on which to hang a defense, but it’s apparently enough for police and the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes to consider the case closed.

“The issue of what the driver knew is a critical element of the case,” says Juan Martinez, general counsel for Transportation Alternatives. “If the DA can’t prove that the driver knew he was involved in the crash, the case fails and the driver can’t be convicted of the crime.”

Martinez continues: “So in hit-and-run cases, any driver who claims they didn’t know they killed someone gets a ‘get out of jail free’ card — unless there is a thorough investigation that examines physical evidence, witness statements, etc. Because police have not released the results of their investigation to the family or anyone else, no one knows whether there was a thorough investigation of potentially criminal conduct, or whether they concluded early on that this was an ‘accident’ and simply accepted the driver’s word.”

It is not unheard of for NYPD to pardon drivers after a hit-and-run, even a fatal one. Another notorious instance involved cyclist Marilyn Dershowitz, whose death last July at the hands of a postal truck driver was captured on video. In that case, it was Manhattan DA Cy Vance who initially kept the victim’s loved ones in the dark.

The driver who killed Dershowitz did not stop after the mid-day collision. He later claimed he was unaware he had hit someone. He was not charged.

"All we know is what we have read in the papers," said Erika Lefevre about the hit-and-run collision that killed her son Mathieu. Photo copyright Dmitry Gudkov

The family of Mathieu Lefevre, the 30-year-old artist killed by a hit-and-run driver while riding his bike in East Williamsburg last week, was joined by dozens of supporters outside 1 Police Plaza today to demand that NYPD rein in deadly driving and end its policy of silence when it comes to fatal traffic crashes.

Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, began the rally by reading from a list of cyclists, pedestrians and drivers killed this year at the hands of motorists who faced no charges of any kind. While drivers continue “killing with impunity on a daily basis,” said White, NYPD has “consistently failed” to take action to stop the violence.

In 2010, White said, 269 people died in New York City traffic. Traffic crashes are the leading cause of preventable death for the city’s children, and from 2000 to 2009 more New Yorkers were killed by cars than guns. Addressing his remarks to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, White said: “You are failing to enforce a basic standard of due care.”

The devastation wrought by the city’s traffic fatality epidemic is made worse by NYPD’s practice of withholding crash information, even from family members of victims. Lefevre’s parents traveled from western Canada immediately upon hearing of their son’s death. Since then, said his mother Erika, they have learned little about the crash.

“All we know is what we have read in the papers,” said Lefevre. Last Friday, the Lefevres waited all day at NYPD headquarters, but were told nothing. No one was available to speak with them over weekend, said Lefevre, and since Monday they have been passed from desk to desk. NYPD revealed to the family that the truck that hit Mathieu, identifiable from visible damage, was found two blocks from the crash site, and that the driver was located through the company that owns the truck. The Lefevres were not given the name of the company or the driver. As for the crash itself, the only details they have been made privy to are time and location. Lefevre said the family was told today that “charges were dropped” against the driver, though she isn’t sure charges were filed in the first place.

Lefevre said that, according to police, the driver of the truck that killed Mathieu was “likely unaware” of the collision.

Intensifying the agony of the families of crash victims is as deeply ingrained in NYPD culture as the department’s laissez-faire approach to traffic enforcement. White said the buck stops at the top.

“Ultimately, what needs to happen is we need leadership,” said White, calling on Kelly and, especially, Bloomberg to tap the city government talent pool to reduce traffic deaths and injuries.

In the case of Mathieu Lefevre, White believes the driver should at minimum be charged under the state’s vulnerable user laws, which have yet to be applied with any regularity by NYPD since they were adopted a year ago.

In the meantime, the Lefevres continue to wait for answers. Erika Lefevre said the last time she talked to her son, who rode his bike regularly during the one and a half years he lived in Brooklyn, was when he called her on October 10, her birthday.

“Mathieu’s life was cut short before he had a chance to develop into what he would become,” Lefevre said. “It is very important that we know the circumstances of our son’s death.”

Last week Matthew Lefevre was killed by a hit-and-run truck driver while biking in East Williamsburg. According to the wisps of information NYPD has released about the case, it seems that police exonerated the driver based only on his own explanation — that he never saw Lefevre or noticed he’d run him down.

At noon today, members of Lefevre’s family will join Transportation Alternatives and Neighbors Allied for Good Growth to call for Ray Kelly’s police department to uphold traffic laws. The event is open to the public and anyone who wants to tell NYPD that street safety matters can attend. The blue dot marks the approximate spot, between the Municipal Building and NYPD headquarters, where the rally will take place.

Details about the circumstances of the crash and why police exonerated the driver in a fatal hit-and-run remain scarce. The victim’s family and friends say the police have not been forthcoming.

Juliana Berger, Lefevre’s former wife, told Transportation Alternatives: “I have been with the family since we have received the news on Wednesday. Almost all of the information we have is what we have read in the newspaper. The fact that we have not been properly informed adds insult to injury. The family is trying to cope with this tragedy, but it seems nearly impossible given the lack of information. We can’t bear the fact that other families have likely been given the same treatment and other families are bound to be treated this way if nothing changes.”

Tomorrow, members of Mathieu Lefevre’s family will join TA and Neighbors Allied for Good Growth to call on NYPD and Commissioner Ray Kelly to uphold traffic laws and protect New Yorkers from reckless driving. The rally starts at noon at NYPD headquarters — One Police Plaza — and the public is invited to attend.

Traffic crash data as it appears on CrashStat...

The Saving Lives Through Better Information Act was passed by the City Council, over the objections of NYPD, in February. The intent was to provide the public with monthly data on summonses and traffic crashes, with the crash data “searchable by intersection” and “disaggregated by the number of motorists and/or injured passengers, bicyclists and pedestrians involved; and the apparent human contributing factor or factors involved.” If you want to find out how many crashes occur in your neighborhood, what’s causing them, and which streets are the most dangerous, this law is supposed to help you.

...and as it appears in NYPD's data dump.

But those looking to learn what’s happening on their streets will have their work cut out for them. Far from the model developed by Transportation Alternatives for CrashStat, which plugs geo-coded crash information into a map of NYC, the initial NYPD crash data dump consists of six PDF files. You can’t search a map for the intersections near your home, school, or office.

Here’s the punchline: You can scour a 300-page doc for the streets near you, and with sufficient time and effort, eventually piece together what’s going on — until the next month, when your slog begins anew. Data on summonses, meanwhile, are issued in a separate report in much the same format. If you want to know where drivers are getting ticketed for violating traffic laws, these documents won’t help you.

“If the NYPD really wanted to make the streets safer for pedestrians, it would make it easier to look at the agency’s traffic data and not bury the public in hard to search documents,” said Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group.

That would have been simple enough, according to Noel Hidalgo, co-organizer of the Open NY Forum and former director of technology innovation for the New York State Senate. “NYPD crash data should be going into the city’s data mine, where every other city agency places their data,” he said. “It’s three years old. From the Department of Education to public safety, data should be coming through a centralized website.”

Hidalgo said NYPD could release geo-coded crash data using MapPLUTO, which the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications has put together to serve as a common platform for all city agencies. “This is like the 17th century of information technology,” he said. “If anything, this adds more confusion to incident reports, and I can promise you that displaying information in this manner adds more burden to the NYPD.”

Juan Martinez, general counsel for Transportation Alternatives, questioned whether the data release complies with the law. “The way the PD chose to publish the data makes me wonder if it is in fact ‘disaggregated’ — you can’t separate out crashes caused by trucks, for instance, short of hitting ‘control+f’ a bunch of times. Had the PD simply released an Excel sheet, it would have been better.”

Martinez pointed out that Mayor Bloomberg “made a career of taking big, complicated datasets and making them accessible,” and wonders how a major agency like NYPD could be exempted from following the city’s commitment to open data.

“We recently reached out to NYPD and offered them the code for CrashStat, and offered to work with them to port their data into CrashStat,” says Martinez. “Our offer still stands.”

Graph: Transportation Alternatives, based on data from New York State DMV

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the adoption of Hayley and Diego’s Law, which established the charge of “careless driving” in New York State and gave police and prosecutors a new tool to hold motorists who injure pedestrians and cyclists accountable. Unfortunately, says Transportation Alternatives, over the past 12 months the law has gone largely unenforced by NYPD.

Intended to demarcate a middle ground between moving violations and more serious criminal charges, Hayley and Diego’s law prescribes that drivers who caused injury “while failing to exercise due care” be required to take a drivers education course and be subject to fines of up to $750, jail time of up to 15 days, and a license suspension of up to six months. But a law is only as effective as those who enforce it, and TA has found that applications of VTL 1146, the statute that includes Hayley and Diego’s Law as well as Elle’s Law, are as rare as ever.

Diego Martinez and Hayley Ng were killed in January 2009 when an idling, unattended van jumped a curb in Chinatown. The driver was not charged.

T.A. filed a Freedom Of Information request in May with the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles and found that the number of applications of VTL 1146 has remained more or less steady for the last few years. T.A. estimates that there will be approximately 77 citations of the statute in 2011 based on a total of 32 citations issued as of June this year, while 97 tickets were issued under 1146 in 2010, 87 in 2009, and 92 in 2008.  These statistics show that a year after these new penalties meant to protect New Yorkers went in effect, they are barely being applied.

“Our family worked hard for these laws to deter motorists from dangerous and lethal behavior,” said Wendy Cheung, Hayley Ng’s aunt. “Nothing can undo the crash that took Hayley away from us, but we can prevent tragedies like this from happening to other families. And we can hold someone who breaks the law and takes a life responsible for their actions. We hope the police will use all the tools at their disposal to bring justice to our streets and protect others from the pain of losing a loved one to traffic violence.”

It should be noted that, in the city, VTL 1146 is enforced by NYPD and the Department of Motor Vehicles and, while district attorneys may advise police to apply it in certain cases, it does not fall under DA purview except for repeat offenders.

Streetsblog has a message in with NYPD regarding TA’s findings.

Police arrest a protestor on the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday. Transit workers say it's not their job to help. Photo: Reuters

But the bus drivers didn’t think helping cops suppress protestors’ first amendment rights was in their job description, and the Transport Workers Union took the NYPD to court this week to assert their rights to abstain from police activity. The union was unable to convince a judge, however, that city buses and bus drivers shouldn’t be utilized for police business.

“TWU Local 100 supports the protesters on Wall Street and takes great offense that the mayor and NYPD have ordered operators to transport citizens who were exercising their constitutional right to protest — and shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” said Union President John Samuelsen, who called the police’s power play “a blatant act of political retaliation.” Three days before the mass arrests, TWU had declared their support for the Occupy Wall Street protests, with their demand for “Democracy Not Corporatocracy.”

Samuelsen says the drivers’ fourth amendment rights were violated, since the government may only compel a citizen to assist in law enforcement when there is imminent danger, and according to Samuelsen, there was no imminent danger.

MTA said the agency has “a long history of cooperating with the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies when they require vehicles to perform their duties” and that they “have no intention of changing [that] longstanding policy.”