Is hit-and-run the new norm?

Maybe I just don’t remember. Maybe it’s because I live in a larger metro area than in the past. Or maybe society really has taken a very nasty turn.

It seems here in Denver a hit-and-run accident is reported every couple of weeks. And I don’t mean drunks who hit parked cars and drive away. I mean drivers hitting people and fleeing the scene.

In the last 12 hours I’ve seen reports of two such incidents here. In the first, a driver hit a 10-year-old boy who’d run into the street — and sped away. Despite the horror of the incident, caught on a neighbor’s surveillance camera, the boy suffered only scrapes and bruises.

Then early this morning a bicyclist was hit and killed by a driver who left the scene. Among the similar incidents in the last year or two, I recall immediately a driver who ran down an entire family in a downtown intersection, and a driver who struck and killed a pregnant woman walking in her neighborhood. Like the others, these drivers fled the scene.

What kind of irresponsible moron runs down another human being and doesn’t stop? Even allowing for a scared driver or one who doesn’t realize what happened, you’d think later news reports and one’s sense of responsibility (or guilt) would compel normal people to turn themselves in.

I know I’m getter older and have a lot of old-fashioned ideas about things. But seriously — not stopping when you hit someone? What’s happened to us?

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The Denver Post reported that in the last nine months of 2010, there were 2,367 hit-and-run cases in the city, with arrests in 56% of them. Of the six fatality cases, only three were solved.