Don't Look Now
I’d heard about Kitty Genovese’s case growing up, half urban legend, half cautionary tale about the coldness of urban space (the same one that made me nervous about Oakland until I actually lived there). This article is a fascinating pealing back of the symbol Genovese became into something a lot more complicated and a lot more humanizing.
Fifty years ago today the New York Times made Kitty Genovese the archetypical victim of urban apathy and violence. Now we know just how wrong they were
The original story of Kitty Genovese’s death, first promulgated by the New York Times in a front-page article 50 years ago today—young single woman brutally murdered while 38 strangers watched and did nothing—was incorrect in almost every particular.
The murder itself was horrifying, of course. The Times got that right. But the story that made Genovese a household name and a symbol of modern social dysfunction got nearly everything else wrong. From the number of witnesses to the details of the crime to the timing of the police response, there are by my count no fewer than 29 significant errors in the original Times story, five of them in its very first sentence.
Many of these mistakes have been public knowledge for years, and as the errors in the narrative have been tabulated the incident’s supposed meaning has been subject to ongoing revision. (In recent years the “bystander effect” has replaced “apathy” as the hook of choice.) But with the publication this month of Kevin Cook’s masterful Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America, however, our understanding of the case, and of Genovese as an individual, is immeasurably enriched. Now, for the first time, we can move beyond mere debunking to construct a full and complex narrative of her life and death, and that new narrative reveals the old one as not merely deficient but fundamentally fraudulent. Some of the biggest flaws in the story, it is now clear, come less from what it got wrong than from what it left out.
