CalMatters wanted to understand how California handles dangerous drivers. When we began looking into it, we found that while there has been research on infrastructure, technology and engineering solutions, there had been little study of the drivers who cause bad crashes.
So we asked the California Department of Motor Vehicles for data on drivers involved in fatal and serious-injury collisions. The agency said it would cost thousands of dollars and take many, many months to provide such data. One reason: The DMV would have to pay outside technical experts to query its own database, which dates to “the late 1970s and is built, at least in part, on programming language that dates back to the 1950s,” said Joseph Chapman, attorney with the agency.
We then tried to get accident reports from cities, but those aren’t always public records.
As a workaround, we went to all 58 county district attorneys’ offices in the state and asked for lists of vehicular manslaughter and homicide cases filed from 2019 through early last year. That’s a subset of fatal crashes. Roughly 1 in 5 fatal collisions appear to lead to a criminal case in California.
The records provided a foundation to study who was causing deadly accidents. But they were just lists. They didn’t tell us the story of each case. To understand the details, we would need to review the court records. However, there’s no centralized system for California court records. We’d have to review them in person.
We sent a team of nine reporters to courthouses throughout the state to review more than 3,600 case files, either on paper or from a computer terminal in the courthouse.
We were able to do this review for all but two counties that had manslaughter cases. Santa Cruz District Attorney Jeffrey Rosell’s office was the only one that refused to release a list of cases. San Bernardino provided us a list, but we weren’t able to review the specific cases — roughly 300 — for a variety of reasons: Files weren’t available in the courthouse, imaged documents weren’t uploaded to public portals at the court, and a clerk said the office lost our request for information on the criminal complaints.
Finally, we needed to understand the driving records of the people charged with manslaughter.
Under state law, certain information on a driver’s record is public. Generally, that includes accidents and citations within the past three years, DUIs within the past 10 years, and information on any suspensions or revocations that are in effect or were recently lifted. So while the records aren’t particularly helpful in identifying a long-term pattern of reckless driving, they do show recent incidents and a driver’s current license status.
We put in thousands of requests with the DMV for drivers’ records, using information gleaned from the court records, such as driver’s license numbers and dates of birth. (We weren’t able to search for some defendants, because the web portal for requesting the records only allows for searches of a certain length — some drivers’ last names were simply too long. In other cases, it’s possible we had a bad driver’s license number or other information that didn’t match what is in the DMV’s database.) Ultimately, we were able to get the DMV driving records for more than 2,600 of the motorists charged with vehicular manslaughter or homicide since 2019.
Manually entering information from the reports into our database of deadly drivers, we were able to spot trends.
We then contacted officials, experts, victims’ families, prosecutors, defense attorneys and drivers accused of causing deadly crashes. We contacted a defense attorney or the defendant — often both — in every case mentioned in the story. Unless noted in the story, they either declined to speak with us or did not respond.
This is the first story of what will be an ongoing series looking at deadly drivers in California and the systemic issues that lead to so many roadway deaths. If you have a tip, email the reporter at robert@calmatters.org.