>>116139150No, they didn't, Harlan Ellison, you fucking liar.
The contemporary reporting in the New York Times suggested that 38 people saw or *heard* Genovese fighting with a man and either assumed that it was a domestic dispute that the police (in 1964 New York city) would probably not trouble themselves to investigate, or that somebody else must already have reported it.
This report has been disputed, as early as 1965, as simply incorrect. There are a number of reasons why. Firstly, this was before 911 worked in NYC as a catch-all emergency number. If you wanted the police out of business hours you had to know which precinct to call. Secondly even though Kew Gardens where the murder took place was even then a relatively affluent (compared to the rest of Queens) neighborhood, that didn't translate to a telephone line in every home, meaning going to a callbox in the night (it was around 3am, in March, so very dark) *while someone was being attacked*. There's an element of personal risk there that can't be dismissed as lack of compassion: fear is a powerful motivator. This was a direct motivation stated by one anonymous witness quoted in the original article.
The truth is she was attacked by a burglar, raped and murdered, and the cops only caught him by accident a week later because he still hadn't fenced her tv when he was arrested for something else. The rest of it is supposition. Even at that time of night in 1964 a couple fighting wouldn't carry far before background noise drowned it out. If you look at the contemporary buildings at the site of the murder, there clearly wouldn't have been that many people other than immediate neighbors who therefore could have heard the initial argument - and since her lung was punctured early in the attack, she wouldn't have been able to scream. When you start counting households instead of witnesses, the number of possible reports that could have been made drops sharply.
