Uber actively works against police trying to investigate these incidents, in ways that are almost actively malicious. They require warrants - not simply police inquiries, nor customer consent, but warrants issued by a judge, to turn over any data, even the identity of the driver. They purposely delete this data on an accelerated basis so that they can say "We don't know" - doing dirty tricks like making receipts that don't include enough information to identify drivers (and intentionally obfuscate). They have ordered and made it both official and unofficial policy for their agents to stall police inquiries until they hit those data deletion dates.

At some level, they are attempting to avoid bad press, but their methods go far beyond "Washing our hands of it, not my problem" and into "Trying to obfuscate and cover up crimes so that we can't be tied to them".

Source: Worked at Uber for about six months and quit in disgust.

None of this is to exonerate the NYT for their biased reporting, because the crime rates in conventional taxes are almost as bad, and closure rates are worse. It's an ugly industry that Uber could have cleaned up but decided the pragmatic approach was to spin doctor.