Kitty Genovese Revisited

Via BPS Research Digest:

Rachel Manning’s group suggest the truth of the story is that there weren't 38 witnesses; probably only one person saw the final, fatal attack; and the police were called. Much of the fresh evidence comes from transcripts of the trial in which Winston Moseley was charged with Genovese’s murder. None of the three witnesses who were called reported seeing the stabbing; in fact, Moseley’s final, fatal attack took place inside the apartment block, out of the view of all but one of the known witnesses. And contrary to the popular notion that no one did anything to help, one of the witnesses claims to have shouted at Moseley, scaring him off from his initial attack – a claim corroborated by a second witness. Moreover, a former police officer – a 15-year-old eyewitness at the time of the murder – says that his father called the police.

So why do we all remember differently?

The commonly told inaccuracies in the Kitty Genovese tale stem from the New York Times article which first broke the news. No doubt this version of what happened, shocking as it is, has subsequently served textbook writers well, seeking as they do to link experimental research with the real world in an engaging way.

So not only does the Internet make it harder for this sort of misreporting to happen now, it also makes it harder for this kind of misreporting to persist.