"No One Helped"

Book 14 of my 2018 Reading Challenge

**I received an electronic copy of this book via NetGalley and would like to thank the author and/or publisher for the opportunity to read and honestly review it**

"No One Helped": Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy
by Marcia Gallo

Summary (via Goodreads)
In "No One Helped" Marcia M. Gallo examines one of America's most infamous true-crime stories: the 1964 rape and murder of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese in a middle-class neighborhood of Queens, New York. Front-page reports in the New York Times incorrectly identified thirty-eight indifferent witnesses to the crime, fueling fears of apathy and urban decay. Genovese’s life, including her lesbian relationship, also was obscured in media accounts of the crime. Fifty years later, the story of Kitty Genovese continues to circulate in popular culture. Although it is now widely known that there were far fewer actual witnesses to the crime than was reported in 1964, the moral of the story continues to be urban apathy. “No One Helped” traces the Genovese story’s development and resilience while challenging the myth it created.
“No One Helped” places the conscious creation and promotion of the Genovese story within a changing urban environment. Gallo reviews New York’s shifting racial and economic demographics and explores post–World War II examinations of conscience regarding the horrors of Nazism. These were important factors in the uncritical acceptance of the story by most media, political leaders, and the public despite repeated protests from Genovese’s Kew Gardens neighbors at their inaccurate portrayal. The crime led to advances in criminal justice and psychology, such as the development of the 911 emergency system and numerous studies of bystander behaviors. Gallo emphasizes that the response to the crime also led to increased community organizing as well as feminist campaigns against sexual violence. Even though the particulars of the sad story of her death were distorted, Kitty Genovese left an enduring legacy of positive changes to the urban environment.

My Opinion
As a psychology major, this case is one often discussed and cited when discussing "bystander syndrome" but as the author intended, I learned much more than the surface details (not all of which were even correct) I knew before.  

" 'For more than half a hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.' With this sentence, on March 27, 1964, the New York Times introduced its account of one of the city's most notorious murders."  Sounds shocking but the number of bystanders has always been exaggerated.  Also, two neighbors actually did call the police plus a neighbor came out to physically help her but it wasn't as easy to reach the police as it is now (the development of the "911" emergency system got a big boost in response to the publicity and pressure on leaders to take action and may be the only good thing to come from this tragedy).

I've heard about Kitty's death many times but knew nothing about her life before reading this.  To quote the author, "I realized that [Kitty] had been flattened out, whitewashed, re-created as an ideal victim in service to the construction of a powerful parable of apathy. It seemed to me that Kitty Genovese's personhood had been taken from her, first by her murderer and then by the media, in order to serve a greater good."

I wish that this quote about apathy wasn't still relevant: "I think the German people might have shown rather more reaction than they did (to put it politely) to the evil portended by Hitler when he first began to climb to power. It seems that most of them welcomed him to power and then excused their inaction on the basis of the power they had given to him."  I'm not saying our current president rises to Hitler-level evilness but I do think there are things his supporters are excusing so they don't have to examine their choices.

A Few Quotes from the Book
"They asked themselves and one another: Who had we become if we could stand by silently and ignore someone's cries for help?"

"Coming at the start of a rapid rise in violent crimes in New York City, the killing of Kitty Genovese served as both a symptom of the disintegration of communities as well as a catalyst for change and activism."