Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [59]
It wasn’t until morning that the Hoffmans found out what happened. “We were interviewed by detectives and learned that she had went around the back of the building across the street, and the guy came back to finish her off,” Hoffman says. “I remember my dad saying to them that if they had come when we called them, she’d probably still be alive.”
Hoffman believes the police response was slow because the situation his father described was not a murder in progress but rather a domestic disturbance—which, by the looks of it, had concluded. The attacker had fled and the victim had walked off, if shakily, under her own power. With a low-priority call like that, Hoffman says, “the cops don’t put down the donuts as fast as if it were to come across as a homicide call.”
The police acknowledged that someone did call after the second attack, in the vestibule, and they arrived shortly thereafter. But Hoffman believes their response may have been based on his father’s original call. Or, perhaps, there was more than one call: Joseph De May has heard from other Mowbray tenants who claim to have phoned the police after the first attack.
It is hard to say how reliable Hoffman’s memory of the events may be. (He did write and sign an affidavit of his recollections.) It is also hard to say if De May’s revisionist history is fully accurate. (To his credit, he points out that “an undetermined number of ear witnesses reacted badly” that night, and perhaps could have done more to help; he is also reluctant to cast himself as the infallible source on all things Genovese.)
De May and Hoffman both have an incentive to exonerate their neighborhood from the black eye the Genovese murder gave it. That said, De May strives hard to not be an apologist, and Hoffman seems to be a pretty good witness—a man who, now in his late fifties and living in Florida, spent twenty years as a New York City policeman and retired as a lieutenant.
Now, considering the various incentives at play, which is more unbelievable: the De May–Hoffman version of events or the conventional wisdom that a whole neighborhood of people stood around and watched, refusing to help, as a man murdered a woman?
Before you answer, consider also the circumstances under which Winston Moseley was ultimately arrested. It happened a few days after the Genovese murder. At about three o’clock in the afternoon in Corona, another Queens neighborhood, Moseley was seen carrying a television out of a home belonging to a family named Bannister and loading it into his car.
A neighbor approached and asked what he was doing. Moseley said he was helping the Bannisters move. The neighbor went back in his house and phoned another neighbor to ask if the Bannisters were really moving.
“Absolutely not,” said the second neighbor. He called the police while the first neighbor went back outside and loosened the distributor cap on Moseley’s car.
When Moseley returned to his car and found it wouldn’t start, he fled on foot but was soon chased down by a policeman. Under interrogation, he freely admitted to killing Kitty Genovese a few nights earlier.
Which means that a man who became infamous because he murdered a woman whose neighbors failed to intervene was ultimately captured because of…a neighbor’s intervention.
SuperFreakonomics
SuperFreakonomics
CHAPTER 4
THE FIX IS IN—AND IT’S CHEAP AND SIMPLE
It is a fact of life that people love to complain, particularly about how terrible the modern world is compared