Numbers
never lie!" I've been hearing that pious refrain in meetings for 30 years
now. The painful truth is that numbers and the people who manipulate or misuse them
can and do lie – all the time. In this era of burgeoning data analytics and endless
fascination with "big data," let's never forget that data without
wisdom can be illusory. Evidence always works best when combined with
experience and expertise.
Take
the number 38. Pundits, professors and politicians have long maintained that 38
“witnesses” remained silent in their apartments as they watched Kitty Genovese’s
murder on the street below in Queens, NY one night in 1964. Thirty-eight witnesses
did nothing to help her, or so we have been told. It turns out that the number
38 was a junior police official’s “guesstimate” in a report filed in the
aftermath of the case. It was purely speculation used to decry the brutality of
human apathy and, later, to codify the cottage industry that became known as
the “bystander effect” or “Genovese Syndrome.” Few social psychology classes in
the second half of the 20th Century – and even today – were immune
from the Genovese case.
Fifty
years later, a clearer picture of these events has emerged in several new books
and author interviews. The work receiving the most attention is Kevin Cook’s, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, The Bystanders,
The Crime That Changed America. It turns out that a neighbor named Robert
Mozer did, in fact, scream at the assailant from his seventh-floor window chasing
him away, only to have him return for a second attack in several minutes. Two
individuals did call the police, who were extremely slow in responding in those
pre-911 days. Another brave woman ran down the stairs to the apartment
vestibule where Genovese managed to flee between the stabbings. She cradled the
dying woman in her arms, awaiting the arrival of ambulances.
Yes,
there is plenty of blood on the hands of certain Kew Garden residents who did
nothing to help. And there is certainly empirical evidence to support the
“bystander effect” or diffusion of responsibility in these situations in which people
assume that others will call the police. The real culprits in escalating a
false story and a bad number, however, were Police Commissioner Michael Murphy
who nonchalantly passed the fabricated number 38 to the young, ambitious New York Times’ Metropolitan Editor Abe
Rosenthal over lunch two weeks later. We are now told that he did so to chase
Rosenthal off another story the NYPD did not want publicized. Rosenthal chose
to give larger-than-life credence to the fictitious data point, with the Times running subsequent pieces with
headlines such as, “Thirty-eight who saw murder didn’t call the police.”
Rosenthal later published a sensationalist book on the case entitled, Thirty-eight Witnesses.
Rosenthal
used the attractive tangibility of the number 38 to build an erroneous
narrative. He propelled the Kitty Genovese story globally, darkening New York
City’s reputation as a crime capital filled with uncaring citizens. The work of
Kevin Cook and others underscores the need to examine the role of human motivation
and error that too often accompanies the misuse of data.
Twitter @jessicamcwade