The voluminous 84-page report fulfills the company’s promise last year to be transparent about safety, and publicly release information about incidents of sexual assault. The report also includes numbers on traffic fatalities and deaths resulting from physical assaults that took place during rides.
Considering Uber’s vast scale — 2.3 billion rides during the period examined — all of these incidents occur very rarely: More than 99.9% of rides on the platform happen without a hitch, the report makes clear. But that’s cold comfort to the people who’ve been sexually assaulted.
“Even one report is one too many,” the company notes in the introduction.
Uber’s track record on how it investigates sexual assault incidents has been rocky, and the company has previously been accused of whitewashing incidents.
In the new report, the multibillion dollar company is painstaking in the way it presents this delicate information, spending about 50 pages putting the issues in context before digging in to data, and repeatedly emphasizing its vast scale and the fact that sexual assault happens in all corners of the U.S.
Indeed, riders are likely safer in an Uber than at home or at school ― about 80% of sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone the victim knows, according to widely cited statistics from the Department of Justice.
The safety report is arguably the highest profile move Uber has made since its current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took the helm a little over two years ago. He made safety a priority and brought on a former Obama-era DOJ official, Tony West, as chief legal counsel.
Still, this isn’t the kind of data companies are keen to reveal. “To be candid, it was a hard decision to make the commitment to publish this report,” West said in an interview with HuffPost. “And the downside is it gives more people more targets to criticize.”
However, West — who pushed the Justice Department to stop enforcing the widely criticized Defense of Marriage Act — was adamant. Uber has a responsibility to millions of users, both riders and drivers. “The public has a right to know this data,” he said. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
However, just how much responsibility Uber has to drivers, and how much legal liability it bears for their actions, is something the company is currently fighting over, arguing that its drivers should be considered contractors, not employees.
Uber released the report early to a handful of outlets, including HuffPost, with the caveat that the information in it not be discussed with experts besides those who had already consulted on it, a group that included researchers from the Urban Institute and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center; employees of security consulting firm The Chertoff Group; and RALIANCE, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending sexual violence in one generation.
WASHINGTON
