“The murder of Kitty Genovese is the ultimate drama of conscience. Dozens of her neighbors were confronted with a moral choice: do I help or not? The most reputable news organizations reported that the answer was uniformly ‘no.’ As a result, Kitty’s death grabbed hold of our collective conscience and became a call to action. A half-century later, it still compels us to ask: What do we owe each other?”
That’s the director of “The Witness,” explaining why he felt compelled to make a documentary about a 1964 murder in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York.
What do we owe each other? Let’s start with the truth.
As reported in The New York Times, the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese by Winston Moseley was a story, at least in part, about the neighbors who heard her screams but did nothing to help. As Martin Gansberg wrote in the Times on March 27, 1964:
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, he 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 two weeks ago today. But Assistant Chief Inspector Frederick M. Lussen, in charge of the borough’s detectives and a veteran of 25 years of homicide investigations, is still shocked.
He can give a matter‐of‐fact recitation of many murders. But the Kew Gardens slaying baffles him — not because it is a murder, but because the “good people” failed to call the police.
The collective callous indifference depicted in the story was so disturbing that it led social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley to conduct lab studies on how the presence of others affects human behavior in an emergency. The studies ultimately led to the concept of the bystander effect or, as it was called by some, Genovese syndrome.
You may have heard of the bystander effect. Hundreds of psychology textbooks describe it, and news articles often cite it. That’s a lot of power that grew out of one newspaper story.
But here’s what really happened...READ MORE
