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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours

This is a lovely theory that was thoroughly disproved by the murder of Kitty Genovese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

In my experience, not one person in an urban area ever attempted to stop my abuser. At least out in the countryside they called the cops a few times.

This is a lovely theory that was thoroughly disproved by the murder of Kitty Genovese.

No, it wasn't. If you read that Wikipedia article carefully, this was a case of misreporting by the New York Times and the popular account is incorrect. This is all from your own link:

More recent investigations have questioned the original version of events.[58][24][67] A 2004 article in The New York Times by Jim Rasenberger, published on the 40th anniversary of Genovese's murder, raised numerous questions about claims in the original Times article. A 2007 study (confirmed in 2014[24]) found many of the purported facts about the murder to be unfounded, stating there was "no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive".[7] After Moseley's death in March 2016, the Times called their second story "flawed", stating:[8]

While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old[fn 1] woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.

Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Investigation by police and prosecutors showed that approximately a dozen individuals had heard or seen portions of the attack, though none saw or was aware of the entire incident.[68] Only one witness, Joseph Fink, was aware Genovese was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide had taken place; some thought what they saw or heard was a domestic quarrel, a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar when Moseley first approached Genovese.[7] After the initial attack punctured her lungs, leading to her eventual death from asphyxiation, it is unlikely that Genovese was able to scream at any volume.[69]

A 2015 documentary, featuring Kitty's brother William, discovered that other crime reporters knew of many problems with the story even in 1964. Immediately after the story broke, WNBC police reporter Danny Meehan discovered many inconsistencies in the original article in the Times. Meehan asked Times reporter Martin Gansberg why his article failed to reveal that witnesses did not feel that a murder was happening. Gansberg replied, "It would have ruined the story." Not wishing to jeopardize his career by attacking a powerful figure like Rosenthal, Meehan kept his findings secret and passed his notes to fellow WNBC reporter Gabe Pressman. Later,[when?] Pressman taught a journalism course in which some of his students called Rosenthal and confronted him with the evidence. Rosenthal was irate that his editorial decisions were being questioned by journalism students and angrily berated Pressman in a phone call.[70]

On October 12, 2016, the Times appended an Editor's Note to the online version of its 1964 article, stating that, "Later reporting by The Times and others has called into question significant elements of this account."[5]

On the one hand, the pattern you are pointing to, where a knowledge-producer who provided a foundational block to a lot of peoples' worldview is, yet again, revealed to have simply made it up is deeply infuriating.

On the other hand, this seems to be the quote that's being questioned:

"There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock."

...And I find that description absolutely absurd when it is applied to our modern world. Maybe it was true in Doyle's time and place. It certainly is not true now.

...And I find that description absolutely absurd when it is applied to our modern world. Maybe it was true in Doyle's time and place. It certainly is not true now.

It is true now in first-world Asian cities. It is sufficiently true sufficiently much of the time in most European cities that the average European urbanite would find the discussion above bizarre.

America (apart from NYC) is bad at policing, in the sense that they can't convert dollars spent on policing into crime reduction efficiently. One upshot of this is that Americans keep trying to move to places that don't need policing. Others are that America is unusually tolerant of vigilantism, and that America tends to substitute harsh punishments for effective policing in the same way and for the same reasons that medieval societies did. Americans are sufficiently used to this that they don't seem to find it a problem - probably because they think it is a universal fact about what is possible - and assume that there must be some reason why Singapore doesn't need policing. Singapore does need policing, and is effectively policed. London and Paris also need policing, are less effectively policed, and while safe by American standards have levels of crime that Singaporeans would find intolerable.

Given the absence of any political faction that wants policing to be expensive and useless, I suspect the reasons for this (which are not well understood) are structural rather than being a policy choice. This excellent substack by a retired cop blames the Bill of Rights.

Right. The statement is false now, but the break isn't where the Kitty Genovese story places it -- witnesses will call the police, but they likely won't come in time (also true in Doyle's time) and the machinery of justice is both uncertain and slow.

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