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Within minutes, photos begin appearing online. Someone posts a video from the shoulder of the road. Someone else starts speculating about what happened in the comments. Before police have had the chance to notify a family, strangers are watching someone else’s worst day unfold on their phones.

Every time I see those kinds of images of car crashes on social media, I think the same thing.

Someone in that vehicle is a husband. A wife. A son. A daughter. A best friend.

Someone’s family may not even know yet.

For one of us, Kristi Hughes, I know how sacred those first hours are. Having lost my husband, Sean, in a preventable car crash, I understand through the worst kind of lived experience that families deserve the chance to receive devastating news from loved ones — not from Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or a stranger’s livestream. They deserve the privacy to process the unimaginable before the world begins watching.

The dead deserve dignity.

The living deserve the space to grieve.

As for the second author of this essay, my name is Michael L. Saile Jr., and I have spent more than two decades representing families after catastrophic injuries and wrongful death as a trial attorney. I have seen firsthand the emotional, financial, and legal challenges they face. In recent years, however, another layer of trauma has emerged. Families are no longer grieving in private. Increasingly, they are forced to confront photos, videos, and online commentary documenting some of the worst moments of their lives.

Technology has transformed how we experience emergencies. Smartphones allow anyone to become an eyewitness, and social media rewards immediacy.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, many of us stopped asking, “How can I help?” and started asking, “Should I record this?”

That shift should concern all of us.

To be clear, technology itself is not the problem. Photos and videos can preserve important evidence, help investigators reconstruct crashes, and even support legal claims. Social media can mobilize communities, connect families with resources, and raise awareness about important issues.

But there is a profound difference between documenting an event for a legitimate purpose and turning another person’s tragedy into content.

For families living through these moments, those images are not simply photos on a screen. They are someone’s final moments. They are the wreckage of a future that will never happen.

Long after emergency vehicles leave and headlines fade, those images can remain online indefinitely. Years later, a child may search for a parent’s name and discover photographs or videos of the crash that took their life. A spouse may unexpectedly encounter graphic images while scrolling online. A family member trying to remember a loved one for the life they lived instead finds the moment they died.

Every time a crash photo appears in my social media feed, I think about the family that hasn’t received that call yet. I think about a spouse sitting at work, a parent picking up another child from school, or grandparents making dinner, completely unaware that life is about to change forever.

There are practical consequences, as well. After a serious crash, insurance companies, investigators, and attorneys routinely review publicly available social media posts. Images, videos, and comments — whether shared by those involved or by well-meaning friends and witnesses — can complicate investigations, spread misinformation, and, in some cases, become evidence.

For anyone involved in a serious accident, a few simple precautions can make a difference:

• Let law enforcement determine the facts before posting or commenting publicly.
• Avoid speculating about fault or the extent of injuries.
• Ask family and friends not to share updates or photos without permission.
• Preserve photos and documentation privately rather than posting them online.
• Remember that once something is shared publicly, it can be difficult — or impossible — to remove.

Perhaps even more important is what each of us can do as bystanders.

If you come upon a crash scene, pause before reaching for your phone. Ask yourself whether recording the moment will truly help — or whether your attention would be better spent moving safely through the area, giving first responders room to work, or simply respecting the privacy of the people involved.

Not every heartbreaking moment belongs on social media.

Before you hit “post,” ask yourself one question:

If this were my spouse, my child, my parent, or my best friend, would I want the world watching before I even knew what had happened?

Every crash scene represents more than twisted metal and flashing lights. It represents a family whose life may never be the same. Technology will continue to evolve. Social media isn’t going away. But compassion is still a choice.

The next time you witness someone else’s worst day, choose humanity over curiosity.

Because the dead deserve dignity. And the living deserve the privacy to grieve. And every child deserves to remember a parent by the life they lived — not by the images the internet refused to forget.

Kristi Hughes is a communications strategist and president of the Sean Hughes Memorial Fund. After losing her husband, Sean, in a preventable car crash in 2021, she has dedicated her work to advancing conversations around roadway safety and preparedness and supporting families navigating tragedy. Michael L. Saile Jr. is a Pennsylvania trial attorney, a partner at Cordisco & Saile LLC, and the host of the “Injury Pros Podcast,” who has, for more than two decades, represented individuals and families affected by catastrophic injuries and wrongful death.

Last month, housing valuations, and therefore property taxes, increased by 3% across the city. Valuations in Kensington, however, went up an average of 15%, with Mantua, Grays Ferry, and Kingsessing not far behind.

What do all of the latter communities have in common? They are all under pressure from rapid gentrification, and they are all communities where residents are the least equipped to pay the property taxes associated with the increased home valuations.

Response across the city was surprise — as if the warning signs had not been there all along.

Some people have remained willfully ignorant about the pressures of gentrification in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods because they don’t want to acknowledge that long-standing city programs were not built to prevent this moment from occurring.

Another set of people are feigning surprise, but are not really surprised at all, because this was the plan all along and part of the displacement strategy of “fixing” these neighborhoods.

And then there are those who are honestly surprised because they simply weren’t paying attention.

While we have acted surprised, we have missed the point that the system that created these conditions is operating exactly as it is intended to function, and that without addressing the city’s reliance on property taxes and its detrimental impact on those least able to pay, we won’t find a way forward and dangers foretold will progress.

Challenges foretold

We should not be surprised.

As a Kensington resident, and the executive director of New Kensington Community Development Corp., I — along with many others — have been sounding the alarm, ringing the warning bells about the likely displacement of long-term community residents for years.

In 2018, I made clear to Philadelphia’s managing director that without a clear plan that addresses the unsheltered population in Kensington, there would be both long- and short-term impacts for the greater community as we went from “camps of unsheltered citizens to the construction of $369,000 homes mere feet away.”

The cycle repeated again in 2024, with new public officials in charge, embarking on their latest plans to “fix” Kensington.

After a period in 2017-2018 that left Kensington ripe for massive investment by prospectors and developers, I warned in an opinion piece in The Inquirer that without a greater plan cocreated with the community, “Kensington will be turned over to privatization and the free market — neither of which have ever been kind to people of color and those with limited means.”

In 2024, while the opportunity was there, it was critical that “any effort to fix Kensington should not just be about eliminating the drug economy or ending Kensington as a containment strategy for the city; it should be about preserving a community,” and that “if none of these answers exist, the second stage of displacement — this time of long-term residents — is already underway” and that “without a greater plan to address the long-term needs of residents that’s cocreated with the Kensington community, my neighbors and I could be cheering our own demise.”

In 2025, I warned of not only the corporate commodification of our community’s housing stock and the detrimental effects that has on communities, but also how in communities such as Kensington — with high rates of poverty and old housing stock — we would see increases in purchases of homes by private equity. Those would then be turned into rentals where new corporate landlords would evict tenants from previously owner-occupied homes at three times the rate of small investors.

At the time, my organization saw that 70% of the more than 500 evictions we had prevented over the last few years were in properties owned by LLCs — many of which were from out of state.

Others issued warnings, too.

In 2025, the Reinvestment Fund reported that corporate investors are most active in Black and brown neighborhoods where they are responsible for more than one in four residential purchases, therefore “creating more extraction through landlords rather than creating and maintaining wealth among homeowners.”

Missed opportunities, new crisis moment

Because we did not act when we were warned or take advantage of the opportunities presented to us, the system is working exactly as it was designed to function — and that has created additional pressures and crises.

Rather than addressing the core problems of poverty and extraction from our most vulnerable, we chose single-issue approaches. How will someone who earns the area median income in Kensington — $30,000 a year — pay for a 15% increase in property taxes, while also trying to survive after cuts to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, to Medicaid, and an underfunded transportation system?

Longtime residents of Kensington are nothing if not resilient, but they cannot absorb injury after injury to their already difficult daily circumstances. After this property tax increase, more of them will find themselves considering moving out of their homes.

Like my neighbors in Kensington, I receive five or six calls, emails, and texts every week asking to purchase my home. As the Reinvestment Fund indicated, communities under pressure — like mine — are at the greatest risk from outside investors.

A different path forward

I acknowledge we have a number of existing programs to provide relief to homeowners feeling the pressure of increases to property taxes, such as the homestead exemption, the Longtime Owner Occupants Program, tax freezes, and filing appeals. These programs should be utilized, modified, and expanded, but none of them will solve our greater problems.

We have left housing solutions to the free market, where the goal is to maximize profit and therefore displacement.

We need to address the city’s overreliance on, and benefit from, the $2 billion in property taxes, much of which is also levied from the most vulnerable residents of the city — and we need to develop a comprehensive affordability plan that is cocreated with the community and those actually implementing anti-displacement strategies.

There are a variety of approaches we can take that mitigate impacts on its low-income residents, and that will counter the rush to displacement:

• Address poverty by advocating for the state to finally adopt an increase to the minimum wage so that our working poor are less exploited for their labor, and so they have the money to address these property tax and social safety net changes.
• Continue exploring and implementing some of the emergent basic income programs that have shown success.
• Expand home repair programs such as Built to Last, which make necessary repairs to prevent homeowners from selling their homes to investors, as well as making their homes more affordable through green upgrades.
• Utilize city revenue that doesn’t burden the most vulnerable and truly makes a difference to the budget. If 10,000 homeowners in upper Kensington all receive an annual increase of $250 to their property taxes, the burden is significant to low-income residents, yet only generates $2.5 million for the city.
• Eliminate the recent reductions in the Business Income and Receipts Tax (BIRT), which cut as much as $300 million annually in revenue for the city.
• Hospitals, universities, and churches should pay property taxes, too.  More than a third of all of the property in the city is owned by hospitals, universities, and churches that don’t pay property taxes due to their nonprofit status while accumulating massive endowments and limiting access to healthcare as they shift from serving as charitable organizations to corporations. As a result, we receive only about two-thirds of the possible revenue from property taxes, leaving at least $1 billion on the table each year.
• The wealthiest should pay their fair share. Philanthropy is part of the social contract within capitalism that tries to maintain a balance between extraction and a point of collapse of the host, the city. It is clear the extractors must do better. We allow people to profit immeasurably from others’ labor and consumption as long as they give pennies back on the dollar. Philanthropic entities are only required to, cumulatively, give 4% of what they have gleaned from earned and unearned income sources to recipients of their largess. It is not enough. The host is not going to survive; the contract has been broken.

We are currently at the front end of the budgeting season, when we have the ability to use our collective brain power to develop and implement a strategy that will prevent anyone from ever having to say “I told you so” again — and for residents to not be victims of the shortsightedness of the city they reside in.

I have just identified billions of dollars in revenue that does not come from the city’s most vulnerable — and there is much more than what I quickly listed. I write this as an invitation to work with others so we can collectively attack the disease of willful ignorance and the displacement of our most vulnerable with a cure of cocreated solutions.

At this moment of surprise, despair is not a strategy — and change is possible. We must have the courage to share or take the power necessary to implement these very actionable solutions.

Bill McKinney is a Kensington resident and the executive director of the New Kensington Community Development Corp.