the bystander paradox

knowing when and how to intervene is the most complicated question of all

Dry January’s over, let’s have a quick one, I know just the spot: Ev's Eleventh Hour Bar, just before midnight on March 12th, 1964. It’s on the corner of Jamaica Ave and 193rd in Queen’s, NYC. I’ll be the middle-aged blonde chatting to the sweet little lesbigay bartender with the pixie cut.

Kitty’s got the rizz, don’t you think? She’s Italian, grew up just over in Park Slope. Once she’s saved up enough tips slinging beer in this dump, she’s going to open her own little pasta place. Ask her about it and she’ll twinkle and spin round like a disco ball and slip you one on the house. Don’t fall in love with her though, seriously, you’ll get your heart smashed to dust. In a couple of hours she’ll be stabbed and then raped then stabbed again and left to bleed in the street by an angry man who hates women. His name doesn’t matter. He’s done it before and dies in jail.

What does matter is that Kitty’s murder will take place close to the building where she lives with her girlfriend in Kew. Poor Kitty Genovese. Only twenty-eight. Kitty’s death will be different, mainly because she’s not a prostitute and cute. Almost instantly it will become A Big Story. An explosion of grief and outrage will send shockwaves first through the city, then the state and eventually all of America will care. Because it’s 1964, it will take a couple of weeks, but eventually the public outcry will give way to a reckoning that will be alchemised into something more forceful: The apportioning of blame.

The man who hates women is the real culprit, obviously, but when public outrage prompts a watershed moment, a failure in the system must be found. The good news is, for all humanity’s goodness, invention and wonder, the world is still a system-failure all-you-can-eat-buffet, so finding one’s not hard.

The question is which one to pick?

Day after day city news reporters will turn up on the doorsteps of Kew Gardens, searching for a new plot point they can bring back to the desk. They will call this process ‘trying to piece together the truth,’ but a more accurate description is that that they are searching for a more satisfying plot point, based on the facts, that cuts through the noise and puts public confusion to rest.

The reporters won’t find one, or they won’t find the right one, because it’s hiding in plain sight¹, so eventually a collective-blame-theory will be pieced together and a bigger more exciting narrative will take hold, one that finds failure in the larger community for standing by and doing nothing while Kitty was killed.

That story won’t make sense or check out in the end, but it will be instantly accepted because it makes dark intuitive sense.