Not all cabs have the glass. It cost money to install and the cabbie just made a poor business decision. The installations are not cheap.

Gross over reaction by the mob does begin to cover the story. People are a strange bunch, They see a child hit by a car (In this case a cabby)and think to themselves "That damn cabby hit the little kid on purpose" . Not the case as per the cabby himself, This guy got bashed in the back of the head and made a mistake. My question is, How did the fare manage to strike the cabby when all cabs are supose to be equipt with the safety glass. Did this cabby have that protection in place? If not then he just learned a very painful important lesson. Protect yourself and get the glass installed. If this wasn't the case, Then how did this happen?

The above incident confirms my view that New Yorkers are only polite, on the rare occasions when they are, through fear.

I had always considered New York to be the rudest city in the world and Mumbai the most polite. I am not a citizen of either and was surprised at a poll which recently said that Mumabai is rudest and New York is politest.But certainly you could easily be lynched in either city.

Wow this could easily be filed under "only in america" not the attack on the driver but the whole story.

i dont kno how u guys do it

Damn, just another day in the big city.

Poop sandwitch

"What a savage, uncivilized land."

Yeah, it is comprised of the unwanted from Europe.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0874962.html

Humans are funny creatures. I'm fairly certain that if you plowed into my daughter, and I'm with a group of my friends, we are very likely to first make sure she wasn't injured too badly, then I'd take her to the hospital, then my friends would start to kick your ass.

And I live in sunny Santa Monica. And I'm white.

If you told those friends that your fare was the cause, then he'd start to get his share of ass kicking as well. Probably not too bad for both of you, as nobody would want to end up in jail themselves. Not that my friends would be all white. In fact, it's usually not the case that my friends are all white. Often only partially white.

The point is that if you hurt little kids, people nearby are likely to act slightly irrationally, regardless of whether that 0.1% of their genetic code has determined them to be a darker skin tone or not, or whether they reside in the outer burroughs or Lincoln, Nebraska.

Nothing savage about defending the defenseless, however irrational that may be. As if our system of justice were any less arbitrary.

A cabbie should be able to take people where he wants to go and not where he doesn't. A cabbie should be able to say "I don't go to East Flatbush, asshole, now get the fuck out of my cab before I tighten a belt around YOUR neck !".

Sad. But did anyone stop to check to make sure the child was ALRIGHT and ALIVE before they decided to use "Texas Justice" on the cab driver? Hmmmmm.....

ONLY IN NEW YORK. Freakin' scabs!!!

I'm wrong, it was not a black cab driver in the CSI episode, I'm pretty sure he was middle eastern.

But I'm positive the passenger was a white female.

And, she can not give a good description of the mob, but then you knew that given that it's a CSI episode.

whoa, SPOILER alert, I remember now, the kid was murdered before being hit by the cab.

Of course the flip side of these mob-vigilante stories is the "CHILD, CABBIE SLAIN BY FARE AS APATHETIC NEW YORKERS STEP OVER THEIR BODIES" version. Give it a week and I'm sure there'll be one of those.

Its that little kids fault! Did you see how he was riding his bike? He was *begging* to be hit!

I saw that CSI episode. I vaguely remember it, the passenger was a white female and the cab driver was black. The cab hit a kid or something or other and a mob came to do some street justice.

I think there was an episode of CSI:Miami with a similar theme...

WhenI was a kid the story would be, "100 people walked by as the child cried for help."

It wasn't a taxi driver, it was a livery driver. He probably worked that neighborhood all the time.

And, of course, it is the law for cabbies to take you wherever you ask, within NYC. If a cabbie refuses, say, "fine, take me to the nearest police station."

I really hope every member of the mob gets charged with assault. Of course tensions were high, but that's just nuts. There's a lot of reasons a car can go askew without meaning the driver should be beaten. Even the alleged robber, who was *probably* at fault (you know, that whole innocent-before-proven-guilty thing) should have been just subdued, not actively beaten. Maybe he was, but that's not how it seems.

What a savage, uncivilized land.

A good reason for Cabbies to not go into the outer boroughs. Not saying this won't happen in Manhattan but why risk it? (not to mention lost fares etc.)

I hope this isn't a glimpse into the future because it's beginning to sound a lot like the Eighties.

Race/hate beatings in Brooklyn, Flashers in the subways, it's deja vu all over again.