Ash Kelley

She was in the vestibule.

She was in the alley.

At most, people heard her cries for help and when they went to see what was going on, she had already moved behind the building and couldn't be seen.

As for no one calling the police, that was also untrue.

Several people called the police that night, but not knowing exactly what was happening, the reports were marked low priority and police didn't respond as they would have if they knew she was being actively murdered.

Right.

Now, regardless of the facts, the story seemed to speak to the people of New York, many of who, like Kitty's parents, were concerned about the changing composition of the neighborhoods and what they thought was rising crime rates.

Journalist Joe Sexton wrote, "...the killing of Kitty Genovese was first a tragedy, then a symbol, then a bit of a durable urban mythology."

That is to say the story, as the New York Times presented it, confirmed what a lot of people already believed, that crime rates were skyrocketing and it was becoming unsafe to live in these neighborhoods.

And that all of this stuff resulted in an extreme form of apathy.

Right.

That they were really making people feel like people are becoming apathetic as a whole.

And it prevented them from even doing anything to intervene for this poor woman.

Right.

Now to the editor, Abe Rosenthal, the story had very little to do with Kitty at all and was in fact all about the state of American society in the mid-1960s.

He wrote in 1999, I was interested only in the manner of her dying.

That is the power of the Genovese matter.

It talks to us not about her, a subject that was barely of fleeting interest to us, but about ourselves, a subject never out of our minds.

Oh.

That's a real thing that was said.