Passenger Safety Doesn’t Reduce Minority Opportunity In Orson Aguilar’s Mercury News essay he argues that fingerprint‐based background checks of Lyft drivers will reduce opportunities for minorities to drive. This couldn’t be further from the truth. More than 90 percent of San Jose taxicab drivers are minorities or immigrants. Undergoing a rigorous fingerprint‐based criminal background check conducted by law enforcement did not stop these individuals from successfully pursuing the solid middle class profession of driving a taxicab. Fingerprint‐based criminal background checks conducted by government can actually assist and enable minorities applying for jobs. For example, a recent report written by law enforcement specialists found that name‐based background checks (such as those used by Lyft) are 43 times less accurate at positively identifying applicants than fingerprint checks. This lack of accurate identification substantially increases the risk of a false positive: when a person with a common name is associated with another person’s record. Should such a mistaken identity occur, there is no opportunity for the prospective Lyft driver to correct it. The applicant is simply rejected outright with no opportunity to appeal or review his application. The same is true for applicants who may have been convicted of a past crime. Because there is no procedure or guarantee of an anti‐discrimination review, Lyft and Uber driver applicants may well be being deprived of their civil rights. By contrast, taxicab applicants have the opportunity to be heard and present evidence as part of standard licensing procedures. There is absolutely no disputing that fingerprint‐based background checks conducted by law enforcement are safer than background checks purchased through private companies. The Federal Bureau of Investigation provides the only truly nationwide criminal background check. For example, the “state criminal records search” conducted by Lyft’s screener, Sterling Infosystems, does not include California, Louisiana, Mississippi or Wyoming. Commercial background checks are not as comprehensive as FBI checks because many states don’t make criminal history records available to these database compilers. Finally, commercial checks don’t search every county, creating serious potential gaps. Passenger safety and economic opportunity for minorities are not mutually exclusive and should not be pitted against each other.
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