WELCOME

The number of road deaths from traffic has actually dropped

Feb. 3, 2017 by Carolyn Mueller

The number of road deaths from traffic has actually dropped from 1,049 in 2013 to 1,812 in 2017.

But even after reducing the number of road deaths to the lowest level since 1980, the number of motor vehicles killed in the U.S. each year is still roughly half the number of motorists killed in 2015.

"It's amazing to see this dramatic increase in road fatalities. It's hard to say how much of it comes from increased traffic or increased deaths or the fact that road fatalities are in the 20-30s. But it is a good sign that the death rate has been falling in recent years," said Dr. John Schuman, the director of the Transportation Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "There are more people dying from car injuries than road injuries."The man who was fatally shot by a South Carolina police officer last month is now charged in both cases in a new U.S. federal criminal case.

William Smith, 24, was arrested in New York on Tuesday on suspicion of murder stemming from an incident on May 30, 2016, when he was shot and killed by Officer J.T. Wilson.

Wilson had been charged with first-degree murder and second-degree assault.

The charges came two months after the South Carolina Highway Patrol, who had been investigating the shooting, said they were looking into Smith's case.

In an internal investigation last month they wrote that Smith shot Smith because "the officer's body was a direct consequence of his involvement in the incident that left him with a broken leg."

"The officers involved were not aware of this fact, and did not have the investigative knowledge required to conduct a criminal investigation into the shooting of Smith," the investigators wrote in a statement.

The Department of Justice, which has the first criminal investigation of an officer-involved shooting, is also investigating Wilson's shooting, the statement continued.

The investigation into Wilson's shooting began when the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, which investigates incidents of domestic violence involving police officers, found a warrant for Wilson's arrest.

Wilson's family reported him to police in August of 2016. Authorities said they were waiting for an autopsy to do a criminal investigation of the shooting. After several days of waiting for a report, Wilson's family released a statement in the New York Times on June 27 saying she was "sorry for any inconvenience" to her family.

But as he was leaving his apartment, he was stopped by