Separating fact from fiction over the myth of the uncaring bystander

THE reader has a life. The reader wants the writer to get to the point, rather than spend time revving on the spot. The reader can be distracted by the letters down below or the leading article alongside.

The first paragraph, therefore, is vital. Holding on to busy readers means that every columnist sweats blood on their opening paragraph, figuring that if you grab the reader warmly by the throat in the first hundred words then, with luck, the reader may stay with you for the rest of the piece. The same principle applies even more forcefully to news stories in all media and always has.

Here’s the opening paragraph of a story published by one prestigious newspaper.

“For more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. Twice the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.”

That was how the front page of the New York Times in the spring of 1964 dealt with a murder in a city suburb. That paragraph caused an exodus from that almost crime- free US suburb, and made it synonymous with violence. It put a new term into public currency: “bystander apathy”.

It generated 50 years of social studies into what caused the collective and contemptible cowardice of the 38 people who watched as Winston Moseley knifed Kitty Genovese beneath a street lamp, and listened to her screaming that she had been stabbed, screaming for help, screaming that she was dying.

Kitty Genovese was a slender brunette in her 20s who managed a bar and drove a little red Fiat of which she was inordinately proud. On that particular night, it was the red car that started the trouble.

If she had been driving a grey mid-size Ford, the killer might not have noticed her. But the small bright car was noticeable as it sped along after closing time. It attracted him, so he did a U-turn in his van and followed her, watching as she got out and locked it, stalking her so that she started to run from him in the dark, catching up with her, overpowering her and sticking a long knife right through one of her lungs, causing it to collapse in what’s called a pneumothorax. As anyone who has ever suffered a pneumothorax will confirm, it is the quintessence of agony and terror as the sufferer fights to pull air into a lung that has gone flat as a pancake.

An eyewitness shoved a window open and yelled: “Leave that girl alone.” Moseley flinched and ran away, returning to and moving his van. Kitty Genovese staggered to her feet and stumbled towards safety, dragging open the door of an apartment building and falling onto the floor of its lobby, bleeding heavily and fighting for air.

Then Moseley came back and stabbed her again, puncturing her other lung. The little dark-haired girl fought him with every bit of self-preservative energy she had, even grasping the blade of his knife in a desperate attempt to fend it off, even managing to cry out for help when she was suffocating. When she was still alive but long past fighting, he sexually attacked her before escaping.

Within days, courtesy of that first paragraph in the New York Times front page coverage, the dead woman was a household name personifying the suffering caused by urban disengagement. The murderer was caught, convicted and imprisoned, but his culpability seemed as nothing, compared with that of the uncaring observers.

Although it was suggested, here and there, that perhaps each one of them assumed that someone else would call the cops, that, according to public opinion, was no excuse.

Thirty eight people allowed a human being to be brutally murdered. By their inaction, they facilitated an atrocity.

Just four years later, two sociologists, one from Princeton, the other from Ohio State University, published a “landmark report” sparked by the Genovese killing, which stated that “present-day society is fragmented, that compassion is disappearing, old moralities crumbling”. This publication, The Unresponsive Bystander, led to dozens of studies aimed at explaining and reinforcing that eponymous notion.

Which in turn led to greater urban fear, to a lessening of mutual trust, to the sense that if any one of us were unlucky enough to get mugged, never mind stabbed in public, bystanders would simply stand by, viewing what was happening to another human being as little more than a brutal spectator sport — just as the 38 witnesses to Kitty Genovese’s demise regarded her killing.

The problem is that the story on which all of this stuff has been predicated was untrue. Catherine Genovese was murdered, yes. She was subjected, over half an hour, to unimaginable suffering. But her suffering was not witnessed by 38 heartless and passive bystanders. Writer Kevin Cook, who recently found surviving witnesses and documented, albeit unused, evidence, has established that only a handful of people heard the initial screams, and one of them, as stated, got rid of the attacker by shouting at him. Many of the others, watching Genovese stagger around the corner, assumed she had been beaten or was drunk, but no more than that. That they didn’t immediately ring 911 (the US equivalent of 999) can be explained by the fact that 911 didn’t exist back then. Calling the police was a much more complicated affair, as opposed to the reflex it is today (the Genovese death sparked the introduction of easily-remembered, easily-dialled emergency numbers).

BUT even with the inherent difficulty, some did call the police in reaction to the first attack. Some did more. One neighbour — a petite woman named Sofia — threw on a coat and followed the blood-trail to find her friend dying in the lobby of nearby apartments. In choosing not to be a passive bystander, the neighbour took the risk that she too might be stabbed.

Newspaper coverage has been described as “the first draft of history”.

In this instance, the reporter and editor wrote a first draft that lifted a murder out of the ordinary into the definitive, damaged a neighbourhood, improved police systems, made the world more fearful — and was wrong in its basic premise.

This happened when media had the time and personnel to do in-depth investigations.

It happened because the editor involved carried baggage. He was super-sensitive to the issue as his sister had almost died in a street attack. Then the rest of media bought into a popular consensus, rather than going back to sources who would have told the truth, and taken the wind out of a great story. It’s easy and populist to be sceptical of the obvious scepticism targets.

It’s much harder to be sceptical of received truth. But it’s much more important.