Uber cleared violent felons to be drivers, report claims

Uber admits it is routinely approving drivers with violent felony convictions — including assault, child abuse, and stalking — so long as those convictions were more than seven years ago. That's in the wake of a damning New York Times investigation (the second in six months) into Uber's ongoing problems with safety, particularly for female riders.

The ride-hailing app does at least have a blanket ban on would-be drivers convicted of murder, kidnapping, sexual assault, or terrorism. But in 22 states, the Times uncovered approvals for drivers convicted of other violent acts past the seven-year horizon. It also found a loophole in 35 states:

Background checks are only looking for crimes committed in the place the driver lived, letting other convictions slip through the net.

Uber defended the seven-year time window as "striking the right balance" between rider safety and letting people who've been convicted of a crime rebuild their lives. But the company has also admitted — in a roundabout way — that its rides aren't safe enough.

When the previous Times report found that Uber received reports of sexual abuse or misconduct against drivers every eight minutes on average between 2017 and 2022, the company responded by saying that 75 percent of those reports were "less serious." By which it meant cases where drivers used explicit language, flirted, or made comments on a passenger's appearance.

Even leaving aside the likelihood that those 75 percent of passengers still felt unsafe enough to report an incident, this still means in effect that Uber admits a "serious" report of sexual abuse or sexual misconduct was filed every 32 minutes.

Meanwhile, a third of people arrested on rape charges have at least one felony conviction, according to a U.S. Department of Justice study. Several Uber drivers convicted of rape in the past five years, and one Lyft driver, had violent felony convictions. Two of these cases took place in California, where people with violent felonies are supposed to be permanently banned from working for ride-hailing apps.

So just how lax is Uber's background check? Our biggest clue comes from officials in Massachusetts, who did background checks of drivers on ride-hailing apps in 2017 and banned 8,000 drivers that had been approved, largely by Uber. (Lyft's policy is not to approve any drivers with violent convictions, no matter how much time has passed; Lyft has also recently allowed riders to block drivers altogether.)

If Massachusetts is any indicator, then, riders have a roughly 1 in 10 chance of getting a driver who would not be approved by state regulators.

Uber reportedly considered but rejected more than 20 new safety measures — including fingerprint checks, deemed too costly and too slow, at a time when Uber wanted to onboard new drivers faster. "We are def not doing everything we can," one Uber executive said in an internal email in 2018.

"The fact this is an internal policy that we don’t feel comfortable talking about," the exec added, "highlights the need for improvement here."