My wife, my sister and I have a tradition for St. Patrick’s Day: she comes over to our place, we eat corned beef and cabbage, and we watch The Boondock Saints.
For those unfamiliar, The Boondock Saints is a 1999 action thriller about two Irish-American brothers in South Boston who come to believe that they’re on a mission from God to slay the wicked.
The movie begins with the brothers, both devoutly (if very heretically) Catholic, attending Mass. One of the attending priests stands up at the lectern and gives a sermon that tacitly approves of the brothers’ vigilante activities. To illustrate his point, he tells the story of Kitty Genovese.
You’ve probably heard the story of Kitty Genovese. The short version is the version the Monsignor tells, which is that a young woman was murdered in broad daylight with dozens of people watching, none of whom intervened because they “didn’t want to get involved”.
It’s one of the most commonly-cited examples of Bystander Syndrome – which is to say, the human tendency to not get involved when they’re in a large crowd, because responsibility is dispersed among that crowd, and everyone thinks someone else will handle it. Less charitably, it’s used as an example of the cowardice and cold-heartedness of human beings in general, or city folk in particular.
Allow me to give you some good news: it’s bullshit. More than bullshit, it’s an outright lie. In the movie’s defense, while there were definitely people who knew that it was a lie in 1999, it wasn’t widely debunked until 2016. Unfortunately, the lie has had decades to sink into the public consciousness as fact (along with all the wrong conclusions drawn from it), but few people have heard the debunking.
So let me tell you the true story of Kitty Genovese.
Continue reading “The True Story of Kitty Genovese”
