Not Getting Involved

New York City, the truism goes, is not America. But it is the American Big City -- increasingly so, as the homogenizing forces of the 20th century make all cities, all towns, all countrysides, and the people in them, interchangeable. In recent weeks, two New York crimes have dramatized facts of big-city life that have implications far beyond New York's five boroughs.

First came the murder of Kitty Genovese in the predawn darkness of the quiet, middle-class community of Kew Gardens. The murderer was a lunatic who had never seen her before. It took 35 minutes; the killer left and returned three times to stab her again and again while Kitty Genovese staggered and screamed and dragged herself along the street. The interesting thing about it was that the police established that at least 37 neighbors, roused out of bed by Kitty's screams, had stared out their dark windows at one time or another, but none of them, in all that 35 minutes, called the police. When it was all over, a man--after phoning a friend for advice--crossed the roof of his building to a 70-year-old woman's apartment to get her to call the police. "I didn't want to get involved," he explained later.

At 3:40 one afternoon last week, an 18-year-old switchboard girl named Olga Romero hurtled naked and screaming down the stairs of a building on busy East Tremont Avenue in The Bronx. In the vestibule, in plain sight of the street (the door was open), she lay screaming and bleeding, while a man struggled to drag her upstairs again. "Help me!" she cried again and again. "He raped me." Heads popped out of offices along the hallway, and a crowd of about 40 gathered outside to watch. No one made any move on her behalf. No one called the police. It was sheer chance that two officers pushed through the crowd.

What has happened that these things should be possible? One thing, certainly, is that the sense of community has been lost in the bigness and bureaucracy of big-city life. In small-town America, people wanted neighbors for a defense against loneliness; in big-city America, people feel that neighbors are merely crowding in on them and threatening their privacy. Nobody knows his neighbor--and doesn't want to.

And no one wants "to get involved" with these unknown and unloved neighbors--it may cost time to testify in court, maybe bring on a lawsuit for interference or for some nameless of fense. The Decent Citizen and Taxpayer is apt to feel that taking any kind of action is unwise, unsafe--and unnecessary.

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