It was not that we went out deliberately and searched for other examples of apathy. What happened simply was that the problem of apathy was in the foreground of the minds of readers and reporters and editors. Stories that might have been passed over suddenly took on significance and were printed. I think that the Austin Street case, abysmally depressing though it was, did have the result of heightening public consciousness, and so do the police. As always happens, a couple of stories received prominence when they did not deserve it. One day a city editor of a competitive newspaper complained pleasantly that he had given big play to an apathy story—about witnesses to a rape—in the belief that the Times would play it big. We were not sure the story held up and played it small, and the city editor who spoke to me was a little puzzled.
A week or so later, I asked Gansberg to go back to the Austin Street neighborhood, to take another good look around.
“I walked up and down the same streets,” Gansberg writes. “Only this time I didn’t concentrate on learning about the murder. I looked at the people and the neighborhood. I wondered about the people. They were just going about their business.
“A man walked a dog; a woman was taking her youngsters to an afternoon social. The trees were still bare. I couldn’t hate the neighborhood, for it was too much like my own in Passaic, New Jersey.”
At the soda fountain where, a week before, Gansberg had talked to the owner and some customers he was remembered. The owner gave him a malted and wouldn’t let him pay. “You’ve done something,” he said. “You’ve made us realize we should help each other.”
A youngster at the counter put his sandwich down. “You were so right,” he said. “Something has happened to this neighborhood. All of us realize we haven’t been paying attention to each other.”
Not everybody felt that way, though. Some were resentful of the attention paid to their neighborhood; some were confused. Some of the witnesses refused to talk. Those who did were considerably more angry than remorseful. They felt that the Times had hurt them. “You don’t realize the danger!”
Some witnesses slammed the door in the reporter’s face this time. They still did not want to “get involved.”
Involved in what? Danger in the streets? They were in the safety of their houses, all of them. The police? They were all quite law-abiding. The courts? Perhaps. Of the thirty-eight, about eighteen had witnessed or heard each of the attacks; the other twenty had heard or seen one—enough to make them witnesses in court. This takes time and is a tedious business. But I do not find it in me to believe that they did not move to the telephone for fear of losing a day’s pay in court.
This is a story without an end. All I know about it I have related above. Moseley is still under arrest and an innocent man in the eyes of the law. The witnesses do not wish to talk any more.
I know only one thing further: that somewhere in this story, some days after we printed it, I felt that there was a truth to be sought after, someplace, for myself if for nobody else. When the Times Magazine asked me to write a piece about the story, I wanted to eagerly, more eagerly than almost any other article I have written.
In the back of my mind, perhaps—I am not sure—was the feeling that there was, that there must be some connection between the story of the witnesses silent in the face of greater crimes—the degradation of a race, children hungering.
I am not sure, but I think there is. But in any case, I do know that I did not want to write the article to make any great political points. I think I wrote it simply for catharsis.
It happens from time to time in New York that the life of the city is frozen by an instant of shock. In that instant the people of the city are seized by the paralyzing realization that they are one, that each man is in some way a mirror of every other man. They stare at each other—or, really, into themselves—and a look quite like a flush of embarrassment passes over the face of the city. Then the instant passes and the beat resumes and the people turn away and try to explain what they have seen, or try to deny it.
The last thirty-five minutes of the young life of Miss Catherine Genovese became such a shock in the life of the city. But at the time she died, stabbed again and again by a marauder in her quiet, dark but entirely respectable street in Kew Gardens, New York hardly took note.
It was not until two weeks later that Catherine Genovese, known as Kitty, returned in death to cry the city awake. Even then it was not her life or her dying that froze the city, but the witnessing of her murder—the choking fact that thirty-eight of her neighbors had seen her stabbed or heard her cries, and that not one of them, during that hideous half-hour, had lifted the telephone in the safety of his own apartment to call the police and try to save her life. When it was over and Miss Genovese was dead and the murderer gone, one man did call—not from his own apartment but from a neighbor’s, and only after he had called a friend and asked her what to do.
The day that the story of the witnessing of the death of Miss Genovese appeared in this newspaper became that frozen instant. “Thirty-eight!” people said over and over. “Thirty-eight!”
It was as if the number itself had some special meaning, and in a way, of course, it did. One person or two or even three or four witnessing a murder passively would have been the unnoticed symptom of the disease in the city’s body and again would have passed unnoticed. But thirty-eight—it was like a man with a running low fever suddenly beginning to cough blood; his friends could no longer ignore his illness, nor could he turn away from himself.
At first there was, briefly, the reaction of shared guilt. Even people who were sure that they certainly would have acted differently felt it somehow. “Dear God, what have we come to?” a woman said that day. “We,” not “they.”
For in that instant of shock, the mirror showed quite clearly what was wrong, that the face of mankind was spotted with the disease of apathy—all mankind. But this was too frightening a thought to live with, and soon the beholders began to set boundaries for the illness, to search frantically for causes that were external and to look for the carrier.
There was a rash of metropolitan masochism. “What the devil do you expect in a town, a jungle, like this?” Sociologists and psychiatrists reached for the warm comfort of jargon—“alienation of the individual from the group,” “megalopolitan societies,” “the disaster syndrome.”
People who came from small towns said it could never happen back home. New Yorkers, ashamed, agreed. Nobody seemed to stop to ask whether there were not perhaps various forms of apathy and whether some that exist in villages and towns do not exist in great cities.
Guilt turned into masochism, and masochism, as it often does, became a sadistic search for a target. Quite soon, the target became the police.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the police in New York have failed, to put it politely, to instill a feeling of total confidence in the population. There are great areas in this city—fine parks as well as slums—where no person in his right mind would wander of an evening or an early morning. There is no central emergency point to receive calls for help. And a small river of letters from citizens to this newspaper testifies to the fact that patrols are often late in answering calls and that policemen on desk duty often give the bitter edge of their tongues to citizens calling for succor.
There is no doubt of these things. But to blame the police for apathy is a bit like blaming the sea wall for springing leaks. The police of this city are more efficient, more restrained and more responsive to public demands than any others the writer has encountered in a decade of traveling the world. Their faults are either mechanical or a reflection of a city where almost every act of police self-protection is assumed to be an act of police brutality, and where a night-club comedian can, as one did the other night, stand on a stage for an hour and a half and vilify the police as brutes, thieves, homosexuals, illiterates and “Gestapo agents” while the audience howls in laughter as it drinks Scotch from bootleg bottles hidden under the tables.
There are two tragedies in the story of Catherine Genovese. One is the fact that her life was taken from her, that she died in pain and horror at the age of twenty-eight. The other is that in dying she gave every human being—not just species New Yorker—an opportunity to examine some truths about the nature of apathy, and that this has not been done.
Austin Street, where Catherine Genovese lived, is in a section of Queens known as Kew Gardens. There are two apartment buildings and the rest of the street consists of one-family homes—red brick, stucco or wood-frame. There are Jews, Catholics and Protestants, a scattering of foreign accents, middle-class incomes.
On the night of March 13, about 3 A.M., Catherine Genovese was returning to her home. She worked late as manager of a bar in Hollis, another part of Queens. She parked her car (a red Fiat) and started to walk to her death.
Lurking near the parking lot was a man. Miss Genovese saw him in the shadows, turned and walked toward a police call box. The man pursued her, stabbed her. She screamed, “Oh my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!”
Somebody threw open a window and a man called out: “Let that girl alone!” Other lights turned on, other windows were raised. The attacker got into a car and drove away. A bus passed.
The attacker drove back, got out, searched out Miss Genovese in the back of an apartment building where she had crawled for safety, stabbed her again, drove away again.
The first attack came at 3:15. The first call to the police came at 3:50. Police arrived within two minutes, they say. Miss Genovese was dead.
That night and the next morning the police combed the neighborhood looking for witnesses. They found them, thirty-eight.
Two weeks later, when this newspaper heard of the story, a reporter went knocking, door to door, asking why, why.
Through half-opened doors, they told him. Most of them were neither defiant nor terribly embarrassed nor particularly ashamed. The underlying attitude, or explanation, seemed to be fear of involvement—any kind of involvement.
“I didn’t want my husband to get involved,” a housewife said.
“We thought it was a lovers’ quarrel,” said another woman. “I went back to bed.”
“I was tired,” said a man.
“I don’t know,” said another man.
“I don’t know,” said still another.
“I don’t know,” said others.
On March 19, police arrested a twenty-nine-year-old business-machine operator named Winston Moseley and charged him with the murder of Catherine Genovese. He has confessed to killing two other women, for one of whose murders police say they have a confession from another man.
Not much is said or heard or thought in the city about Winston Moseley. In this drama, as far as the city is concerned, he appeared briefly, acted his piece, exited into the wings.
A week after the first story appeared a reporter went back to Austin Street. Now the witnesses no longer wanted to talk. They were harried, annoyed; they thought they should keep their mouths shut. “I’ve done enough talking,” one witness said. “Oh, it’s you again,” said a woman witness and slammed the door.
The neighbors of the witnesses are willing to talk. Their sympathy is for the silent witnesses and the embarrassment in which they now live.
Max Heilbrunn, who runs a coffee house on Austin Street, talked about all the newspaper publicity and said his neighbors felt they were being picked on. “It isn’t a bad neighborhood,” he said.
And this from Frank Facciola, the owner of the neighborhood barber shop: “I resent the way these newspaper and television people have hurt us. We have wonderful people here. What happened could have happened any place. There is no question in my mind that people here now would rush out to help anyone being attacked on the street.”
Then he said, “The same thing [failure to call the police] happens in other sections every day. Why make such a fuss when it happens in Kew Gardens? We are trying to forget it happened here.”
A Frenchwoman in the neighborhood said, “Let’s forget the whole thing. It is a quiet neighborhood, good to live in. What happened, happened.”
Each individual, obviously, approaches the story of Catherine Genovese, reacts to it and veers away from it against the background of his own life and experience, and his own fears and shortcomings and rationalizations.
It seems to this writer that what happened in the apartments and houses on Austin Street was a symptom of a terrible reality in the human condition—that only under certain situations and only in response to certain reflexes or certain beliefs will a man step out of his shell toward his brother.
To say this is not to excuse, but to try to understand and in so doing perhaps eventually to extend the reflexes and beliefs and situations to include more people. To ignore it is to perpetuate myths that lead nowhere. Of these the two most futile philosophically are that apathy is a response to official ineptitude (“The cops never come on time anyway”), or that apathy is a condition only of metropolitan life.
Certainly police procedures must be improved—although in the story of Miss Genovese all indications were that, once called into action, the police machine behaved perfectly.
As far as is known, not one witness has said that he remained silent because he had had any unpleasant experience with the police. It is a pointless point; there are men who will jump into a river to rescue a drowner; there are others who will tell themselves that a police launch will be cruising by or that, if it doesn’t, it should.
Nobody can say why the thirty-eight did not lift the phone while Miss Genovese was being attacked, since they cannot say themselves. It can be assumed, however, that their apathy was indeed of a big-city variety. It is almost a matter of psychological survival, if one is surrounded and pressed by millions of people, to prevent them from constantly impinging on you, and the only way to do this is to ignore them as often as possible.
Indifference to one’s neighbor and his troubles is a conditioned reflex of life in New York as it is in other big cities. In every major city in which I have lived—in Tokyo and Warsaw, Vienna and Bombay—I have seen, over and over again, people walk away from accident victims. I have walked away myself.
Out-of-towners, and sometimes New Yorkers themselves, like to think that there is something special about New York’s metropolitan apathy. It is special in that there are more people here than any place else in the country—and therefore more people to turn away from each other.
For decades, New York turned away from the truth that is Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Everybody knew that in the Negro ghettos, men, women and children lived in filth and degradation. But the city, as a city, turned away with the metropolitan brand of apathy. This, most simply, consists of drowning the person-to-person responsibility in a wave of impersonal social action.
Committees were organized, speeches made, budgets passed to “do something” about Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant—to do something about the communities. This dulled the reality, and still does, that the communities consist of individual people who ache and suffer in the loss of their individual prides. Housewives who contributed to the N.A.A.C.P. saw nothing wrong in going down to the daily shape-up of domestic workers in the Bronx and selecting a maid for the day after looking over the coffle to see which “girl” among the Negro matrons present looked huskiest.
Now there is an acute awareness of the problems of the Negroes in New York. But, again, it is an impersonal awareness, and more and more it is tinged with irritation at the thought that the integration movement will impinge on the daily personal life of the city.
Nor are Negroes in the city immune from apathy—toward one another or toward whites. They are apathetic toward one another’s right to believe and act as they please; one man’s concept of proper action is labeled with the group epithet “Uncle Tom.” And, until the recent upsurge of the integration movement, there was less action taken within the Negro community to improve conditions in Harlem than there was in the all-w
hite sections of the East Side. It has become fashionable to sneer at “white liberals”—fashionable even among Negroes who for years did nothing for brothers even of their own color.
In their own sense of being wronged, some Negroes of New York have become totally apathetic to the sensitivities of all other groups. In a night club in Harlem the other night, an aspiring Negro politician, a most decent man, talked of how the Jewish shopkeepers exploited the Negroes, how he wished Negroes could “save a dollar like the Jews,” totally apathetic toward the fact that Jews at the table might be as hurt as he would be if they talked in clich’s of the happy-go-lucky Stepin Fetchit Negro. When a Jew protested, the Negro was stunned—because he was convinced he hated anti-Semitism. He did, in the abstract.
Since the Genovese case, New Yorkers have sought explanations of their apathy toward individuals. Fear, some say—fear of involvement, fear of reprisal from goons, fear of becoming “mixed up” with the police. This, it seems to this writer, is simply rationalization.
The self-protective shells in which we live are determined not only by the difference between big cities and small. They are determined by economics and social class, by caste and by color, and by religion, and by politics.
If I were to see a beggar starving to death in rags in the streets of Paris or New York or London I would be moved to take some kind of action. But many times I have seen starving men lying like broken dolls in the streets of Calcutta or Madras and have done nothing.
I think I would have called the police to save Miss Genovese but I know that I did not save a beggar in Calcutta. Was my failing really so much smaller than that of the people who watched from their windows on Austin Street? And what was the apathy of the people of Austin Street compared, let’s say, with the apathy of non-Nazi Germans toward Jews?
Geography is a factor of apathy. Indians reacted to Portuguese imprisoning Goans, but not to Russians killing Hungarians.
Thirty-Eight Witnesses Page 6