A phenomenon called the bystander effect was proposed as the result of a grisly crime. The way I probably misremember the tale, Kitty Genovese was robbed, raped, and murdered as a crowd of people watched and did nothing. Nobody tried to stop the assailant, nobody called the police.
It sounds like a fucking nightmare.
Probably because you’d have to be asleep to believe it.
Today’s Moment of Science… Kitty Genovese & The Bystander Effect.
In 1964, the New York Times ran a front page article with a startling headline. “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police; Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector.” Thirty-eight people apparently “watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks” for about a half an hour, unmoved to action. It’s unclear if the discrepancy in numbers from the headline was a typo or semantics because the article credits one witness who called the police. It’s left a little ambiguous on if that call was before or after she died.
Along with interviews and police commentary, the detailed account dedicates thirteen paragraphs to describing the half hour of the attack. Genovese spotted her assailant and paced “nervously” towards a police call box. He caught up with her, stabbing her in the first of three attacks that night. She screamed for help. Her last known words came during the second attack. “I’m dying, I’m dying.” In the last attack outside her building, she was stabbed, raped, and robbed. Cops arrived within two minutes of being called, but why so long from her initial cries for anyone to contact the police? Neighbors gave varying degrees of bullshit answers.
“I didn’t want to get involved.” The response became emblematic of the case.
The quotes and rich tapestry of details regarding Genovese’s nervous walking must have come from interviewing those thirty-eight witnesses, surely. Stick a pin in that.
Initially referred to as Genovese syndrome, the bystander effect is sometimes taken to mean that safety is an illusion, the world is an uncaring place, and you may as well get it over with now and just fucking punch a cassowary in the dick because nobody out there’s gonna help you in your hour of need.
More accurately? It suggests that people aren’t as likely to help a victim in the presence of others as they would be alone, but this is complicated by other factors many times over. Social psychologists have researched and found evidence supporting an endless list of variables that can affect whether a bystander offers assistance or not. The perceived risk of getting involved, their ability to competently help, and if they judge a situation to need help or not can all affect someone’s decision to tender aid.
The studies on this are mixed, at best. An experiment analyzing how often a staged accident resulted in bystanders stopping found that people offered assistance far less often when they were paired with a stranger: 70% alone compared to 40% when paired. Given what happened to Kitty Genovese, in some eventual larger grouping of people, that percentage must drop to zero, right?
Funny thing though. I mean, not funny ‘ha ha.’
That front page NYT piece was the second article in the paper of record about Genovese’s murder. The first appeared on page twenty-six with a much less spectacular headline: “Queens Woman Is Stabbed To Death in Front of Home.” It was four short paragraphs. The police questioned everyone and searched everywhere and were still clueless. Well, it said they “had no clues.” Samesies.
Out of the 636 murders in New York City that year, why a remix of this one?
Fucking “allegedly,” the “38 witnesses” were sharted straight from the asshole that was police commissioner Michael J. Murphy. Over lunch with NYT editor Abe Rosenthal, he was pressed for the latest gossip about a scandalous murder with confessions from two men. Winston Moseley confessed to killing Genovese and two other women, Annie Mae Johnson and Barbara Kralik. But in the Kralik case, the police already interrogated a 19 year old kid named Albert Mitchell for over 50 hours. They beat him senseless until he gave definitely not an “anything to stop the torture” confession.
The true, ugly narrative might emerge that Kitty could have been alive if the police spent their time hunting down the real killer instead of beating a Black teenager for two days. A more convenient narrative for the cops had to be spun to the press: they could have done their jobs if it wasn’t for those pesky calloused neighbors who just didn’t call.
The neighbors, for the record, were fucking pissed.
Joseph De May, a lawyer who reconstructed and analyzed the case for years, said “Yeah, people heard something. You can question how a few people behaved. But this wasn’t 38 people watching a woman be slaughtered for 35 minutes and saying, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be involved.”’
Sources vary, but two or three people contacted the police that night. Maybe a dozen people total “witnessed” the crime, but that includes people who heard screaming but didn’t catch a glimpse or realize what was happening. Only one person really saw the stabbing and didn’t act at all, another saw it and didn’t physically intervene but called the police.
Genovese’s neighbor, Sophia Farrar, was awoken when someone else in the neighborhood alerted her that they’d heard her friend Kitty screaming in distress. Farrar rushed to her, likely arriving moments after the killer left. Sophia forced the door open; Genovese’s body was propped against it, resting in a pool of blood. Farrar cried out to another neighbor to contact the police.
Sophia tried to comfort her friend, holding Kitty as the life drained out of her. She died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. They then watched for decades as the story of their neighborhood, their friend was turned into a false cautionary tale about how nobody will help you.
What about the experimental results that supported “Genovese Syndrome”? Those might not be the best measure of how likely someone in distress is to get help when a crowd is present. A better measure, and hear me out, is how often people really do help. A 2019 analysis of crimes caught on surveillance footage showed that bystanders intervene over 90% of the time. The more bystanders, the better the chances that one of them would act.
Kitty Genovese was 28 and working as a bar manager at a place called Ev’s. She lived with her girlfriend, Mary Ann Zielonko, in a quiet neighborhood in Queens, and enjoyed the folk music scene. One of the most famous photos of her was her mugshot from when she was arrested for gambling charges.
This has been your Moment of Science, suggesting that it’s not a morality tale if you have to lie to tell it.
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