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 twenty-five 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 “good people” failed to call the police.
As with Assistant Chief Inspector Lussen, shock and bafflement were
the standard reactions of almost everyone who learned the story’s de-
tails. The shock struck first, leaving the police, the news-people, and
the reading public stunned. The bafflement followed quickly. How
could thirty-eight “good people” fail to act under those circumstances?
No one could understand it. Even the murder witnesses themselves
were bewildered. “I don’t know,” they answered one after another. “I
just don’t know.” A few offered weak reasons for their inaction. For
example, two or three people explained that they were “afraid” or “did
not want to get involved.” But these reasons do not stand up to close
scrutiny: A simple anonymous call to the police could have saved
Catherine Genovese without threatening the witness’s future safety or
free time. No, it wasn’t the observers’ fear or reluctance to complicate
their lives that explained their lack of action; something else was going
on there that even they could not fathom.
Confusion, though, does not make for good news copy. So the press
as well as the other media—several papers, TV stations, and magazines
were pursuing follow-up stories by now—emphasized the only explan-
ation available at the time: The witnesses, no different from the rest of
us, hadn’t cared enough to get involved. We were becoming a nation
of selfish, insensitive people. The rigors of modern life, especially city
life, were hardening us. We were becoming “The Cold Society,” unfeel-
ing and indifferent to the plight of our fellow citizens.
In support of this interpretation, news stories began appearing regu-
larly in which various kinds of public apathy were detailed. The Times
actually appears to have developed an apathy “beat” for a period fol-
lowing the Genovese revelations. Also supporting such an interpretation
were the remarks of a range of armchair social commentators, who, as
a breed, seem never to admit to bafflement when speaking to the press.
They, too, saw the Genovese case as having large-scale social signific-
ance. All used the word “apathy,” which, it is interesting to note, had
been in the headline of the Times’s front-page story, although they ac-
counted for the apathy differently. One attributed it to the effects of TV
100 / Influence