I.

 

ON MARCH 13, 1964, a little after 3 a.m., a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Catherine Genovese returned home to her apartment at 82 – 70 Austin Street in the Kew Gardens section of Queens in New York City. She was the night manager of a bar in a nearby community. Austin Street was a middle-class, tree-lined avenue flanked by apartment houses whose ground floors were given over to retail stores. The building where “Kitty” Genovese, as she was called by almost everyone in the neighborhood, lived was one such apartment house, a mock-Tudor structure with storefronts bordering the main street and separate entryways along the side and back to the apartments above. Adjacent to the apartment house was a suburban train station and commuter parking lot, which fronted on Austin Street.1

Kitty Genovese parked her car in the train station parking lot, turned off the car lights, locked the door, and started to walk the one hundred feet to her entryway. Apparently she noticed something that alarmed her, because she then turned away from the direction of her entryway and toward the street, walking rapidly up Austin Street, where a half block away there was a police call box. She got only as far as a streetlight in front of the neighborhood bookstore before a man caught up with her, grabbed her, struggled with her, and stabbed her. She screamed. Lights went on in the ten-story apartment house at 82 – 67 Austin Street that faced the bookstore. Kitty Genovese cried, “Oh my God, he stabbed me! Please help me, please help me.”

From one of the upper windows in the apartment house, a man called down, “Let that girl alone.” Other lights were turned on. The attacker fled back up Austin Street toward a white sedan parked in the commuter parking lot and he crouched there. No one from any of the apartment houses came down to the street. Kitty Genovese struggled to her feet and turned back, away from the call box, toward the side of the building by the parking lot beyond which her apartment lay. But before she could even get to the corner of the building, the assailant was on her again. She cried out, “I'm dying! I'm dying!” as he repeatedly stabbed her.

Windows were opened again and lights were turned on in many apartments. The attacker ran to his car, got in, and drove away. A city bus passed. It was 3:35 a.m. No one came to Kitty Genovese's aid from any of the buildings that overlooked Austin Street. She staggered to her feet, and again began to try to reach her apartment, which lay on the far side of the building from where she had been attacked. She was, however, now too weak to reach her entry. She made it about halfway, and unable to go further, she crawled under the stairs of another entry at 82 – 62 Austin Street, and tried to hide there. Her attacker, having circled the scene at a distance, then drove back again to the parking lot, got out of his car, and methodically searched the entryways until he found Kitty Genovese and fatally stabbed her. He returned to his car and departed. Still no one came to her assistance. Indeed it was not until almost 4 a.m. that a call was finally made to the police. Throughout the assault, not one person telephoned the police or any of the emergency services. The man who ultimately did call explained that he had only done so after much deliberation; in fact, he had asked a friend on Long Island for advice, and that person had persuaded him to call the police.

Over the next few days police took statements from thirty-eight persons who had witnessed the crime. The nation was stunned by the appalling account of so many bystanders doing nothing while such a brutal crime was committed. People groped for an explanation of what had happened. Why didn't her neighbors help Kitty Genovese? In 1964, many experts on human behavior were sought out to provide an explanation for the apparent apathy evident in the circumstances of the Genovese murder.

One psychiatrist attributed the tragedy to a constant feeling in New York that society was unjust. “It's in the air of all New York, the air of injustice… the feeling that you might get hurt if you act, whatever you do you will be the one to suffer.” A sociologist at Barnard College offered an alternative view: it was an example of the “disaster syndrome.” The result of witnessing a catastrophe such as a tornado or a murder destroyed the witnesses' feeling that the world was a rational place and resulted in an “affect denial” that caused them to withdraw psychologically from the event by ignoring it. Another psychiatrist proposed that it was the confusion of fantasy with reality, fed by the continual watching of television, that was responsible. “We underestimate the damage that these accumulated images do to the brain. The immediate effect can be delusional, equivalent to a post-hypnotic suggestion.”

A psychiatrist suggested that the murderer vicariously gratified the sadistic impulses of those who witnessed the murder. “Persons with mature and well-integrated personalities would not have acted in this way.”

Dr. Karl Menninger, the director of the Menninger Clinic, attributed the tragedy to “public apathy that is a manifestation of aggressiveness.” And one theologian suggested that “de-personalizing in New York had gone further than we realized,” to which he added, “Don't quote me.”

One is inclined to be skeptical about such “explanations.” They seem to provide, if they provide anything, a commentary on the world of the speaker more than the world of the event. And yet such shocking instances of bystander behavior are not uncommon, even if few of them are attended by the publicity of the Kitty Genovese murder. In January of 2000, a boy was beaten on a Boston bus while passengers looked on and did nothing.2 In September of 2000, a woman was lured into a luxury apartment in a suburb of Fort Worth and murdered. Although all of the neighbors heard what one of them described as “piercing, gut-wrenching scream[s]” and listened for half an hour while the woman was murdered, nobody called the police.3

When such incidents occur, many explanations are put forward. “I would assign this to the effect of the megalopolis, which makes closeness very difficult,” said one psychoanalyst at the time of the Genovese killing. “Apathy” was cited by many commentators as an explanation. Also, some referred to a “lack of concern for our fellow man.” But the thirty-eight witnesses of Kitty Genovese's murder did not simply look at the scene once and then ignore it. Rather they continued to stare out their windows. One couple turned out their apartment lights to get a clearer view.

What does explain this? Some of the most fruitful psychological research into the subject of emergency intervention was undertaken as a consequence of the Genovese murder. Two psychologists, John Darley at Princeton University and Bibb Latane of Ohio State University, spent four years in a program of research into what determines bystander intervention in emergencies. In a remarkable series of experiments, staging “emergencies” in stores, offices, and laundromats, ranging from epileptic seizures to thefts and disorderly conduct, they managed to discredit virtually all the usual explanations. Darley and Latane hypothesized that the paralysis that seemed to grip bystanders resulted from what they called a “diffusion of responsibility” that occurred in situations as diverse as when a woman falls and sprains an ankle, smoke pours into a room through a ventilating system, or a cash register is robbed.