Instead of looking for real leads, the police spent six hours interrogating Zielonko as their primary suspect, asking her invasive and irrelevant questions about their sex life, including what sex positions they enjoyed. Yes, really. ACAB ACAB ACAB.
How did the cops catch Winston Moseley, Kitty Genovese's killer? They didn't. He confessed. He was arrested for an unrelated suspected robbery (TV set) and while in custody for that, he just... happened to mention that he killed Kitty (as well as two other murders).
These are all the FACTS about Kitty Genovese's murder. So now we need to look at why almost every single thing I wrote is different from the popular story about her murder. What are the myths, and why do people believe them?
The blame for this lies mostly with the @nytimes, and specifically Abe Rosenthal. Rosenthal was at the time the metropolitan editor, but later promoted to Managing Editor and then Executive Editor (the top position at the paper). Oh, and he was also a homophobe.
Abe Rosenthal was the executive editor of the NYTimes from 1977-1986. His homophobia is cited as a big reason that the NYT's coverage of AIDS in the first five years of the pandemic was so sparse (and terrible) - they literally just ignored the story.
I want to say that the NYT ran a story based on police press releases without fact-checking it (which, as @equalityAlec documents, they routinely do). Except in Genovese's case, it seems they went further than that, basically misrepresenting even the inaccurate police reports!
The NYPD said that they spoke with 38 people and collected police reports from them. The NYT ran that as a headline claiming that 38 people watched Kitty Genovese get murdered and do nothing. Which, as should hopefully be clear by now, is utter nonsense.
There weren't 38 witnesses to Kitty Genovese's murder, by *any* definition of "witness". Most who heard it had no reason to believe a murder was taking place. And of those that did, multiple people did call the cops! The problem is that THE COPS IGNORED THE CALLS.
One important detail that's often forgotten in modern retellings of this story: "calling the cops" did not mean calling 911 at that time, because 911 DID NOT EXIST IN 1964. In fact, Kitty Genovese's murder was the catalyst that motivated NYC (and the country) to set up 911.
The creation of 911 as a centralized emergency number is maybe the one mostly-good thing that happened in the aftermath of Kitty Genovese's murder. Unfortunately, almost everything else that resulted from it ranges from "bad" to "infuriatingly horrible".
I say 911 is "mostly good" because on the one hand, it's great that if someone has a heart attack, you can call an ambulance without having to think. But on the other hand, it can literally be a way to summon armed state agents on your behalf, which very often has bad results.
Abe Rosenthal had lunch with the NYC Police Commissioner, who mentioned the incident to him. Rosenthal then published a story containing many outright fabrications, implying bystanders ignored her and police later caught the attacker. nytimes.com/1964/03/27/arc…
The NYT story is on the website, and there's a remark "Editors' Note Appended", but.... I actually don't see the editors' note itself anywhere on the page. There's no indication that the story was retracted about fifty years later (yes it took that long).
The story literally quotes a Lieutenant who's wondering "why didn't anyone call us?", which is of course nonsense because multiple people called the police over that half-hour period! The cops just ignored it. This is what happens when you use cops as your primary sources.
Kitty Genovese's murder is largely unknown. But the mythological, fictional story of her death (which has ~zero basis in fact) became a national news sensation, thanks to the NYTimes article which pushed a narrative later termed the "bystander effect", one of urban apathy.
That fictional story erases the fact that Kitty and Ross were both gay, and therefore would not assume that the police would do anything to help the situation (an assumption which was proved correct *by the very facts of this exact story*).
The fictional story assumes that cops would have intervened if they'd been summoned, which is counterfactual: the cops *were* called, multiple times, and they simply decided not to.
In fact, even if the cops had witnessed the stabbing themselves, there's no reason to believe that they would have saved Kitty Genovese. Why am I so sure? Because that exact thing happened. And courts ruled that the cops did not need to intervene.
In fact, even if the cops had witnessed the stabbing themselves, there's no reason to believe that they would have saved Kitty Genovese. Why am I so sure? Because that exact thing happened. And courts ruled that the cops did not need to intervene.
The fictional version of Kitty Genovese's death became what was essentially a pre-Internet meme. It was used as a symbol of everything that's wrong with "urban" life - despite taking place in what's still a suburban neighborhood, even to this day.
The myth was so widely known that even Bill Clinton mentioned Kitty Genovese thirty years later, as a punchline illustrating the dangers of violent crime and problems with "how we think about ourselves and each other".
That one still boils my blood, even to this day, because Kitty Genovese's murder *is* a story about how we think about each other. But not the one Clinton thinks it is. It's a story about community support, about friends looking after each other in the best ways they can.
Kitty Genovese's murder was used as a political tool to construct a moral panic about cities as "dangerous". Combined with desegregation and the civil rights movement, this led to white flight, suburbanization, and the re-segregation of American society that we still have today.
White flight from the cities led to the gutting and de facto segregation of social services, including mental health, welfare, and housing. The housing crisis today? Homelessness in cities? That's all a *choice* - a choice made to uphold a segregated and anti-urban social order.
Jordan Neely died homeless and hungry, in a society that could have afforded to feed him and house him, but which chose not to. He was killed by a man eager to believe that cities are full of danger, a counterfactual myth that is still promoted today by media & politicians.
Kitty Genovese's murder has been used to push an agenda that is radically at odds with what would have benefited her and her friends, judging by their own actions and all available facts of the case.
And undeniably, Kitty Genovese's murder was used to push for policies and societal structures which directly cause the problems Jordan Neely suffered from - homelessness, poverty, hunger - and the situation under which he died - a trigger-happy vigilante murder.
We should be cautious when discussing the senseless deaths of random citizens - these people weren't trying to fight for anything broader. They were simply trying to live their lives, and murdered merely for having the audacity to try that.
By expecting too much "meaning" from a victim's death, we risk overshadowing the entire life they lived - nearly three decades, for both Genovese and Neely! And that does a disservice to these people who, by all accounts, were vibrant characters who lived rich lives.
At the same time, we would do an even greater disservice to them by ignoring the circumstances of their death entirely, or using those deaths to exacerbate the very problems which contributed to it - as happened with Genovese, and as we're seeing some do with Neely too.
For Kitty Genovese and her family (both biological and chosen), there isn't any happy ending. Her brother lost his legs in Vietnam after joining the Marines, not wanting to be seen as an "apathetic bystander".
Sophia Farrar, the friend who held Kitty as she was dying, was plagued by the false narratives about Kitty's death over the years. She would only talk about it if asked, and perpetually tried to set the story straight. She died at in 2020 at 92, having been married 71 years.
Which is to say that Kitty Genovese herself could conceivably still be alive today. At 88, I like to think she'd be an tough as nails old woman - a lifelong Italian New Yorker, born in the interwar years, with a wife, and full of stories from her days as a bartender and bookie.
Yes, Kitty Genovese was briefly a bookie. That first photo in the thread is actually her mugshot from when she was arrested for taking bets on horse races from her customers at the bar where she worked! The myth of her death overshadows the rich character of her actual life.
But instead, Kitty died at the age of 28, with her girlfriend nowhere in sight, because some asshole wanted to kill a stranger, and because the cops literally can't be trusted to help anyone, even when they're called (heck, even when they directly witness the crime).
The myth of Kitty Genovese would have you believe either that she died alone, or that she died with a crowd of people watching idly through the windows. That's false, but in a way, it's an apt metaphor for the truth: the world ignored her death, seeing only what they want to see.
Kitty Genovese did not die alone. She died in the arms of a friend who risked her own life to rescue her. A friend who cradled Kitty in her arms as she bled out, whispering in her ear to comfort her. "I only hope that she knew it was me, that she wasn’t alone," - Sophia Farrar.
That, right there, is a heartbreaking and queer story to the core. It's a tragic tale of love, family, and community support. Which makes it all the more disgusting that the mass media version of the story not only erases all of that, but claims it's the exact opposite.