News of little note
Gainesville Sun, 4-20-24
Two people are dead and two were injured early Saturday morning after a Florida Highway Patrol vehicle used a PIT maneuver to stop a fleeing vehicle in Waldo.
The Sun, 11-17-24
A 21-year-old Hillsborough County man died Saturday morning in a single-vehicle crash in southeast Alachua County, according to a report from the Florida Highway Patrol.
The Sun, 12-3-24
A head-on crash early Tuesday morning on Williston Road in Alachua County resulted in the deaths of both drivers, according to a report from the Florida Highway Patrol.12-3-24
The Sun, 12-24-24
Three people were killed Monday in a crash involving a car and motorcycle on Newberry Road west of Gainesville, according to a news release from the Florida Highway Patrol. Sun.
The above Sun reports of recent deaths on local roads and highways have a few things in common:
- The content is almost exclusively drawn from Florida Highway Patrol press releases.
- The details consist of whatever some FHP PR guy decided to shoehorn into a three or four brief paragraph release.
- None of the dead are identified by name.
The days when a Sun police beat reporter might be routinely dispatched to seek out additional details of a local highway fatality are long gone. Because, well, The Sun no longer has a police beat reporter.
But even if the Sun did still have a police beat reporter it wouldn’t make much difference. The FHP releases provide scant details after an auto fatality. And if reporters did want more they might have to wait weeks, or even months, until the official report is ready….and then pay the FHP money to access the report,
This because the FHP has taken the position that someone who dies as a result of traffic violence is a crime victim. And Florida’s Marsy’s Law allows law enforcement to withhold the names of crime victims.
And never mind that most traffic violence fatalities do not result in the filing of actual criminal charges.
Now if you, like me, believe that cars are death machines – especially since American auto marketing strategies mainly consist of turning out models that are bigger, more powerful and even faster than last year’s models – then you might be inclined to believe that anyone who dies as a result of traffic violence is indeed a crime victim.
Because it really ought to be a crime to manufacture and sell the killing machines that are the autoAmerican vehicles of choice.
But I suspect the FHP’s interpretation of Marsy’s Law is more a bureaucratic convenience than a deliberate strategy to keep public information away from the public.
Not that it matters. In the end the result – the depersonalization of the very human victims of traffic violence – serves the greater autoAmerican interest.
Who exactly died on that road in the early morning hours? Somebody’s wife? Somebody’s daughter? Maybe the mother of four, or a veteran recently returned from deployment?
Doesn’t matter. Look at the news. They weren’t people, really, but rather statistics. Hardly worth pondering.
And certainly not in a culture that so values speed, size and the freedom of the road that 43,000-plus faceless victims of traffic violence every year seems an acceptable price to pay…
…for the autoAmerican way.
Who died? Who cares? Three paragraphs and a cloud of dust later the dead are almost immediately shuffled out of sight and out of mind.
Listen, if a kid falls into a well, that’s news.
But if a kid is mangled beyond recognition in a smoking heap of wrecked Detroit steel, that’s a news brief.
And the autoAmerican way.
FreeGNV 