Remembering Kitty Genovese
This Retro Report video reminds me of this book called Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences that I've been meaning to pick up. I forget exactly where I heard about this book, but basically, it de-mystifies the entire Kitty Genovese story as one of extreme urban apathy. The common narrative in the media, first published by The New York Times in 1964, is that this community heard and watched Kitty Genovese die without doing a single thing. But in the decades since, a newer narrative has come out that depicts the community as one that tried to help without putting themselves individually in more danger.
And yet, this story continually gets linked with the bystander effect even though it doesn't really paint a true picture of what exactly happened.
