[EligibleDecoy]

So the NTSB investigation won’t be good enough?

> Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced a partnership with two law firms to “launch legal action to hold the wrongdoers responsible” and mitigate harm to city residents.”

I’m afraid this won’t really identify the root causes and make all the stakeholders less likely to be honest.

[pc86]

As the sibling comment says the NTSB doesn't investigate crimes, and you don't need to wait for an NTSB report to believe their could have been criminal negligence, or to being an investigate into that.

If someone was negligent and caused this accident and these deaths, they should be held accountable. That will keep people in similar positions in the future more likely to be honest and accountable, not less. You don't avoid prosecuting crimes on the off chance it will make criminals more likely to lie about being criminals.

[lazide]

'Blameless postmortem' requires people are able to discuss things without being blamed.

If they are (or are likely to be) being criminally prosecuted, being completely candid would require they'd have to be idiots or so clearly innocent of wrongdoing even the most cynical lawyer thinks it will be fine.

Even if someone tries to falsify evidence or frame their client.

Which everything being easy and fine is not very likely, frankly.

Especially when a bunch of pissed off commuters and taxpayers are pressuring politicans, families are looking for compensation for dead relatives, and you're front page news globally - with damages running in the hundreds of millions at a minimum.

[ThrowawayTestr]

The NTSB doesn't investigate crimes.

[VHRanger]

More than that, to my knowledge, they can't be used as evidence of crimes.

The NTSB runs as a "blameless postmortem" org. Their findings are to be used to change systemic processes.

[InitialLastName]

For good reason: if your priority is safety moving foward, you don't want people hiding information about incidents because they are concerned about repercussions.

[tialaramex]

Right, and you get different answers when you ask different questions too.

In the UK there's a case where the RAIB (accident investigators) concluded that systemically it was not possible for the human doing the job to ensure that particular accident (resulting in the death of a rail passenger) doesn't happen. So they made recommendations for how to prevent it in future on that basis.

But the human who was actually there doing the job was prosecuted, successfully and I believe sentenced to prison, because (prosecutors made the argument) regardless of whether it was technically true that it might have happened anyway, the death did happen, and it did happen while the accused wasn't strictly doing everything by the book.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Eyewitness testimony tends to be less detailed, less reliable, less timely, less actionable, and less useful, the further one gets from an event, temporally. Best to get it sooner vs. later.