We will likely never know what led Inspector Michael Ameri, the head of the New York Police Department’s Highway Division, to take his own life last Friday, not far from his home in Suffolk County. We may also never fully know the chain of events that caused James-Scot Zachary Gregg, a 33-year-old Brooklynite from Evansville, Indiana, to be toppled from his bicycle and crushed by an 18-wheeler on 6th Avenue near Sterling Place in Park Slope three weeks earlier, on the morning of April 20, a Wednesday.

In my mind, the deaths are linked. Gregg was killed in the confines of the NYPD’s 78th Precinct, which Ameri commanded from early 2012 to mid-2014, briefly but emphatically establishing himself as the most street-safety-conscious police official in memory. But despite assurances by Ameri that he would use his standing as head of the Highway Division to finally bring NYPD crash forensics into the light of day, the NYPD is refusing to divulge even the most rudimentary facts about the crash that killed Gregg.

Police comments after the crash went through even more gyrations than usual. As Streetsblog reported:

An initial NYPD statement on the crash said Gregg had “collided into [the] rear tire of the tractor trailer.” A second police statement said the truck driver overtook Gregg and “something like a wind force… sucked the bicycle toward the back of the truck.” The day after Gregg’s death, the department said that “for unknown reasons [Gregg] fell to the ground and was struck by the rear passenger tires of the tractor-trailer.”

Earlier, Streetsblog founding editor Aaron Naparstek reported from the crash scene that precinct cops were telling passersby that Gregg had been holding the side of the truck, which could have been to hitch a ride or, more likely, in a desperation move to stay aboard when passed too close by a giant truck.

Stumped by the NYPD’s convoluted accounts, New York Times metro reporter Andy Newman submitted a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to the department on April 24, seeking:

— Collision Investigation Squad (CIS) reports

— Any summonses issued to the tractor-trailer driver or criminal charges filed against him

— The driver’s name and address

— The cargo the tractor-trailer was carrying

— Where the tractor-trailer was coming from and what its destination was

— The length of the tractor-trailer

— Any determination on whether the tractor-trailer was allowed to be on that street

— Any determination on whether its driver was in compliance with Vehicle & Traffic Law Section 1122 which states in part that “The driver of a vehicle overtaking another vehicle proceeding in the same direction shall pass to the left thereof at a safe distance”

— Any determination on what caused or may have caused Mr. Gregg to fall from his bicycle.

The letter denying Newman’s request arrived two weeks later, claiming that “such records/information, if disclosed would interfere with law enforcement investigations or judicial proceedings.”

How such disclosure would interfere with anything other than the NYPD’s penchant for secrecy isn’t clear. But the script at the scene and later remains the same: cops whispering to the media about the victim’s dumb move; scanty questioning of the driver’s actions; genuflecting before the “ongoing investigation”; and dumping the eventual findings of the crash analysis down the memory hole, never to be shared with public health specialists and advocates or even with grieving members of the community.

Fed up with this concealment syndrome, my fellow Right Of Way organizer Keegan Stephan and I arranged a meeting with Inspector Ameri in the fall of 2014, shortly after his promotion to head the division. Like other safer-streets advocates, we were impressed with Ameri’s bold strokes as C.O. of the 7-8 to protect cyclists’ and pedestrians’ rights — moves like taking activists’ guerrilla plastic cones as a cue to install metal barriers to safeguard the bike lane on Bergen Street near Flatbush Avenue. At the time we reached out to Ameri, the de Blasio administration and Vision Zero were less than a year old, the mandate to quell traffic mayhem was unmistakable, and there was a new sheriff in town. We biked out to division headquarters in eastern Queens in heavy rain. We arrived soaked, but with high hopes.

Ameri heartily endorsed our first ask: that he instruct the division’s Collision Investigation Squad to release fatal crash investigations and distill the knowledge gained into periodic digests. He said he agreed that disseminating this information could help public health specialists, transportation officials and experts, and the NYPD itself better comprehend the types of behaviors and street designs that cause traffic injuries and deaths and to move toward corrective measures. Gaining approvals would take time and we would have to be patient, but Ameri pledged to move forward. He also assented to use his position to instruct police officers to stop leaking (mis-)information to the press at the scenes of crashes — a practice that compounds families’ pain while perpetuating pernicious myths of pedestrians causing their own demise.

We then drew Ameri’s attention to the newly enacted Local Law 19-190 creating a criminal misdemeanor penalty for drivers who injure or kill pedestrians or cyclists who had the right of way. However, he balked at our insistence that officers on the scene charge the offending driver when evidence clearly suggests the statute has been violated. The very next day, a motorist driving in reverse vaulted onto the sidewalk in front of PS 307 in the Bronx, fatally striking 8-year-old Rylee Ramos. The driver was not charged with a crime. Keegan and I broadcast our outrage on Twitter, and soon lost our line of communication with Inspector Ameri.

Looking back, our October 2014 meeting with Ameri may have been a high water mark of NYPD interest in Vision Zero. Motorists who killed lawful pedestrians went uncharged under 19-190 until a bus driver who ran over the leg of teenager Jiahuan Xu in a crosswalk in Williamsburg in February 2015 was led away in handcuffs, igniting a backlash from union officials and their tabloid allies that has effectively kept City Hall from insisting that police charge culpable drivers. Last October NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said at a civic forum (video at minute 46) that he would “follow up” on releasing CIS reports, but without further pressure, nothing has come of that.

Instead, we have reached the point where the NYPD has no compunctions in turning aside so elementary a question as whether the driver of the 18-wheeler that killed James Gregg was legally permitted to operate on a narrow light-commercial avenue filled with bicycles and pedestrians. The killing and maiming go on, but the NYPD is never accountable. Until the police are made to put combating traffic dangers on a par with combating other violent crime, there will be no safe streets in the City of New York.

— Charles Komanoff, May 19, 2016