Opinion | Why can’t D.C. keep dangerous drivers off the road?

If only Ms. Walker’s most recent encounter with the authorities had ended so uneventfully. The 43-year-old D.C. resident was driving fast in a black Lexus SUV on Independence Avenue early in the morning of March 15, according to a police report. After being pulled over by a Park Police officer on Rock Creek Parkway, Ms. Walker bolted and later veered into oncoming traffic. The resulting head-on collision with a Honda left three people inside it dead: 42-year-old Lyft driver Mohamed Kamara and passengers Olvin Torres Velasquez and Jonathan Cabrera Mendez, both in their 20s. Ms. Walker has been charged with second-degree murder; her blood alcohol level was over the legal limit, according to authorities.

Some highway deaths can be chalked up to quirks of fate — an otherwise conscientious driver suffers a heart attack and loses control or sudden weather conditions send vehicles spinning out. The Rock Creek crash lies on the opposite end of the spectrum. A driver with a well-documented history of reckless behavior on the roads — she was convicted of a DUI in the 2015, 2018 and 2020 incidents cited above, plus two DUIs in Virginia — continued plying them. The result was an all-but-inevitable catastrophe.

Government exists to prevent such outcomes. Research has shown that drivers with DUI histories are a particular menace on the highways and are “overrepresented” in fatal crashes. Ms. Walker never should have been behind the wheel, though it’s unclear whether she had a valid driver’s license at the time of the crash, as The Post has reported. What happened?

Enforcing the rules of the road is a multiagency undertaking, especially in the District — which is home to a panoply of police forces. To help, Lucinda M. Babers, the D.C. deputy mayor for operations and infrastructure, told a D.C. Council roundtable on May 23 that in her previous posting as the District’s DMV director, she worked to build a pipeline of notifications from D.C. Superior Court to the DMV regarding convictions for traffic-related offenses. “We were not getting them,” she said.

The deputy mayor went on to address Ms. Walker’s three DUIs, saying the DMV received notification from D.C. Superior Court for “none of them. And now D.C. DMV will go back out to D.C. Superior Court and say, ‘What has happened? We did not get these notifications.’”

Oh yes, you did, replied D.C. Superior Court. Electronic notifications of Ms. Walker’s cases, said the court in a tweet, “were each successfully shared with the DC DMV’s computer system.” Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) last week said, “Whatever gaps there are, we will fill them.” The mayor’s office didn’t answer multiple questions from us.

“How many others convicted of DUIs have not had action taken on them?” council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large) said to us. “This behooves everyone to go backwards and look.”

Filling the gaps starts with knowing where they are, and it sounds as though local authorities have a few.

The deaths of three men just going about their lives come at a time when city residents see brazen lawlessness all around them. Shootings; thefts; mayhem on local thoroughfares — now add the Rock Creek Parkway crash. The vehicle that Ms. Walker was driving had 38 outstanding speeding violations, according to a court document. And not long after being pulled over by the Park Police, Ms. Walker “placed the vehicle in ‘drive’ and fled the traffic stop at a high speed,” according to the document. The officer drove to an “unrelated” incident because fleeing the police is not a “pursuable” offense under Park Police rules.

Proper regulation, of course, cannot occur so long as the city officials don’t even know about a driver with multiple DUI convictions, an inexcusable lapse that has yet to be fully explained. We’re waiting.