March 13, 1964 - Collective Inaction Helped Kill Kitty Genovese
45 years ago, today, approximately 30-some-odd people heard or even saw Catherine Susan Genovese being sexually assaulted in front of her home, in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, New York. In total, she was assaulted three separate times by a knife wielding necrophile Winston Moseley. In the 35 minutes she was being attacked, screaming for her life, not one person intervened. Only one call to the police was made, 35 or more minutes after she had first been attacked - minutes after she had already been slain. A police cruiser was on-scene in under 2 minutes, and indubitably would have saved the life of Kitty Genovese, has anyone called them 30 minutes earlier.
While some of the resulting news articles overstates or misstated facts, and clearly made up some aspects of the event... Once can't argue that, the diffusion of responsibility or pluralistic ignorance of her neighbors was at least partially responsible for her death.
That's why it's good to know that a majority of my close friends seem to have the moral compass necessary to take SOME kind of action, in any such similar situation. I would say many of them are vigilantly righteous enough, there's a good chance the police would have been coming to collect Moseley's unresponsive body from the gutter. Comfortable complacency & indifference has always been one of those things high up on my personal s*it list, which is probably why I've worked to surrounded myself with a handful of responsible people. Sure, it took me 31 years... But, at least I know that such people DO exist.