Riding Into Danger Is Part of Job

This is what you do for a living: Each day you admit a perfect stranger into your confined, isolated work space and you make a cold, hard-cash transaction. The nature of your business compels you to have a lot of dough on hand in this not very hospitable environment. The stranger knows this.

You conduct similar transactions all day and into the night. Most times the deals are concluded successfully and everyone leaves happy. But human nature being what it is, you’re inviting trouble, right?

Driving a taxi is a tough-luck kind of job: Everything can be going swimmingly until one day some knucklehead decides you are his get-rich-quick scheme. Boom. Tough luck.

A study released this month by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that taxi drivers are the most likely to be the victims of workplace violence, especially murder. According to the study, 86 taxi drivers were killed nationwide in 1994. Most often the victims are killed by armed robbers posing as customers.

New York, land of taxis, stands at the pinnacle of cabbie-directed mayhem: In 1992, a record 45 were slain. But a car-obsessed town such as Los Angeles is not immune, recording six slayings of city-licensed taxi drivers since 1990. And assaults are a continual threat.

Kia Tehrany, a Yellow Cab driver for nine years, has been punched out a few times. It was nothing personal, he said, just intimidation.

“They just want to show they are powerful enough not to pay the fare,” he said. “Most drivers are not going to endanger their lives over a couple of bucks.”

Los Angeles taxi drivers are prey for every manner of peril. Many average 300 to 400 miles of driving a day on the region’s convoluted streets and freeways. If they avoid being taken out by a semi on one stretch of road, on the next they may be targeted by a scam artist hoping to cash in on an insurance policy by intentionally causing an accident.

Tehrany, 45, originally from Iran, has lived in Los Angeles for 12 years, witnessing an increasing level of societal crime and violence that has spilled over into the back seat of his cab. The territory is tougher, the patrons are tougher, the daily encounters more threatening.

Taxi drivers have few options though. Under law, Tehrany cannot refuse a potential fare. About the most he can do is ask the customer to show proof that he or she can pay.

“Obviously, if somebody is dressed like a gang member, you are afraid, but you can’t do anything, so you take a risk.”

No one knows whether James Reavis felt he was taking a risk August 29, 1994, when he picked up a fare heading for Mt. Olympus, north of Hollywood. It would be his last customer.

When the man got out of the cab at Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Willow Glen Road, he shot the 57-year-old Reavis once in the left temple. Witnesses saw the man rifling through Reavis’ cash box. It was the last recorded slaying of a city of Los Angeles-licensed taxi driver, said Alan Willis, division engineer of the city’s taxi regulation bureau. The assailant was caught and convicted.

Willis notes that the killer had to exit the cab to accomplish his deed. The city adopted a requirement in 1993 that all taxis install bulletproof safety shields between the front and back seats. It did not save Reavis, but the shields have by all accounts led to a sharp decline in assaults and robberies.

The drive to require the safety shields was led in part by Dennis Rouse, a senior vice president of L.A. Taxi Co-op, which has a fleet of 600 taxis and 1,000 drivers operating from the Mid-Wilshire district to South-Central Los Angeles. In a six-week period in 1991, two of Rouse’s drivers were slain.

The taxi industry has adopted other measures to reduce the daily risks. Most taxi companies use the same computerized dispatch systems employed by police forces. The computer records the taxi’s location, provides a record of where a call originates and identifies a number dialed from a pay phone. In Los Angeles, where 98% of rides are called in rather than flagged down, it is a virtual computerized printout trail.

And at Los Angeles International Airport, every taxi stand is now equipped with a 24-hour video surveillance camera. Last Christmas, during a rash of robberies, the cameras helped nab the culprits, Rouse said.

Co-op drivers also must take a “street” class on how to be better aware of where they are on the map and how to act accordingly.

Said Rouse: “You have to quickly understand human nature. This is the hard part.”