How to save a life.

Martin Gangsberg wrote a newspaper article entitled Thirty-Eighty Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police (Mar 27, 1964), explores the reasoning behind the “The Genovese Syndrome”. The author started with the background information about the neighborhood and the victim; that lead to the attack and why it was unusual for the area and the aftermath of the attack. Gangsberg wrote this article in order to bring light to neighborhoods that don’t look after each other. The intended audience for this piece is those that think that people who think things that happens outside their house is there problem.

The article was disturbing to me because that could be anyone of us. I remember being a little girl and a lady beating on my grandmother’s door. She was screaming that she had been raped and needed to come in. My grandmother never left the lady in the house but she did call the police. The girl was gone by the time the police arrived but my grandmother still did the right thing by calling the police because that was the right thing to do. It’s scary knowing that people won’t look after you when you’re at your lowest. It wouldn’t have affected anyone by calling the police and staying where you were and the attacker wouldn’t have known who called.

In the article, people couldn’t explain why they didn’t call the police for the young lady and if they did have a reason it was selfish and inhumanly. For instance, one interviewer even said “I was tired. I went back to bed.” (140). Was sleep really that much more important than someone being murdered? That was what many residents in this neighborhood thought. The author also included background on the neighbors leading to that the neighborhood shouldn’t have been use to the chaos and the screaming. One example of saying that she was living in a Tudor Building (137) and that the families living in the area made about $35,000 to $60,000 (139). With saying that, it was unusual that be calm in that situation. I believe that the author was trying to say that this behavior was usually more common in less fortune neighborhoods. No matter the reason or the circumstances, out of 38 people no one picked up the phone to say someone is getting hurt on the street. When at any instance that you can help someone without harming you should. There was no excuse that no one could help her.