A cry from the dark

A half century after an infamous New York murder: Have we learned anything?

It was 3AM and the short walk from the train station to her front door was lit by a few streetlights. There may have been music from radios escaping partly opened apartment windows. Some neighbors were still awake. She'd walked home from work on this route before and it probably seemed familiar and safe. It wasn't.

Suddenly a stranger walking down the street chased and accosted her. Over the next half hour, newspapers later wrote, 38 people saw or heard her cry out as the murderer repeatedly stabbed, raped and then killed 28-year-old Kitty Genovese.

This happened in 1964 only 3 years after, and 12 miles east, of where Jane Jacobs wrote about street safety in Death and Life of Great American Cities.

This month two books commemorate the 50th anniversary of the tragedy: Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences and Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, and the Crime That Changed America.

Few cases have spawned so many theories and books. I've blogged on this, particularly in relation to the CPTED concept, natural surveillance. Environmental psychology now calls it the bystander effect or the Genovese Syndrome.

In short, if people can surveil an area but do nothing about crime, eyes on the street mean nothing. True, some offenders may still desist if they think they are being watched. But even this surveillance deterrence has limits. It won't apply to psychopaths, drug addicts, or the inebriated, a big list in the possible offender category.

The latest research by Timothy Hart and Ternace Miethe examined the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and discovered a bystander was present in 65 percent of the violent victimizations reported in the survey.

Environmental psychology research produces replicable results showing the by-stander effect. The fact is this: If most people do nothing, natural surveillance means nothing.

Politicians look for the simple answer. Good Samaritan laws - forcing by-standers to act under penalty of law! Legal thinking often boggles the mind! In emergencies people don't think of penalty for inaction. They think of escape. 

Fortunately, there are better solutions. Since the 1980s we've known social cohesiveness increases the power of people-caring. Social cohesiveness, research confirms, increases the power of natural surveillance. Eyes that care take action. When people know each other, know their area, have a sense of connectedness and can clearly watch their neighborhood, natural surveillance works.

In recent SafeGrowth classes we saw firsthand why pairing social cohesion strategies with natural surveillance is crucial. Students tell me that some 1st Generation CPTED instructors still fail to properly teach 2nd Generation CPTED.

There is no excuse for ignoring these essential lessons. Read about the Kitty Genovese tragedy. Let’s not repeat history!

Reversing the by-stander effect: For Kitty

Last week the New York Times ran an article called Remembering Kitty Genovese, a haunting story about the young woman murdered late one night in 1964 in front of her home as she returned from work. According to news reports plenty of people witnessed or heard Kitty’s murder, but they did nothing.

I blogged about this a few years ago in A cry from the dark. 

In CPTED this is known as the by-stander effect and it refutes natural surveillance as a form of guardianship to prevent crime.

New York bar scene in 1963 - screenshot from Remembering Kitty

Ironically, journalists eventually discovered one witness did in fact call police and another initially hollered at the murderer, but none of that mattered to Kitty nor to public sentiment. As the Times story said: A paradigm of danger and indifference in an anonymous city had taken hold. 

THE CRIME THAT CHANGED AMERICA 

Studies in environmental psychology now confirm the by-stander effect. In CPTED today we know natural surveillance is but one small part of a much bigger prevention story.

Second Generation CPTED teaches us that eyes on the street are not enough if they are eyes that don’t care or belong to people too afraid to act. Creating a genuine sense of connection between neighbors is how guardianship through surveillance works best. Without that social cohesion there is no community for people to care about. Research has also demonstrated how social cohesion cuts crime or how its absence triggers it.

Parking lot where Kitty Genovese parked the night of her murder - screenshot from Remembering Kitty

THE AFTERMATH

Murderer Winston Moseley died in prison two weeks ago. Kitty’s brother Bill published a letter to the Moseley family that said: …my family’s better angels do now express our condolences to the Moseley family. What do we owe to all our fellow beings? … Let us join with the hope of shared egalitarian equanimity. 

Last October The Witness premiered at the New York Film Festival, a documentary following Bill Genovese’s efforts to examine Kitty’s life and speak to Moseley in prison prior to his death.

Bill Genovese is right; Egalitarian equanimity - probably through social cohesion - should become our rallying cry in the 21st Century neighborhood. That much, at least, we owe to Kitty.

"We just don't want to get involved"

How useful is natural surveillance for crime prevention if people see, but don't care? If crooks know people don't care, or are too afraid to act, why bother with street lighting and eyes on the street?

The video above shows by-standers in New York having fun with a free mega-phone. True, there's no crime in-progress. Still, it does sound like they care. The cynically-inclined might predict mega-phone abuse, or theft. Maybe, but not here. On this day altruism rules.

It wasn't always so.

On another New York day, actually the evening of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death on the street near her home. Her murder was the random act of a predator.

Crime photo of Kitty Genovese murder scene near her New York apartment in 1964

The New York Times reported 38 people watched out their windows and did nothing. For decades, "we don't want to get involved" became the motto for urban decay and alienation. It laid the foundation for a whole new social psychology - proxemics. Oscar Newman built defensible space out of it. Today we call it CPTED.

Now the by-stander effect is understood. In a twist of irony it turns out the 38 witness theory is probably false. Reinvestigation revealed only 3 people saw small portions of Kitty's murder, some called police immediately and, due to poor lighting, most misunderstood what was happening.

I wonder...with better lighting and territorial control of semi-public space on that street, would Kitty Genovese be alive today to play with street megaphones?

Occam vs. Einstein - Crime science gets a facelift

Achilles and the heel - photo Creative Commons by Tasoskessaris 

[SPOILER ALERT - This is a rather long theory blog on emerging research. Apologies. But every now and then, like bad tasting medicine, it's necessary to ingest!]

Yesterday I was external examiner for an MA thesis defense on CPTED and the geography of youth gun violence. The candidate did a great job. She passed her defense and is now a new criminology scholar. Reading her literature review I was struck how difficult it is for new scholars to siphon out decent research. Crime and place studies range from sensible to silly.

Not long ago I got to do some siphoning of my own – for better or worse - while reading two crime studies. The better version was titled “The reasoning criminal vs. Homer Simpson: conceptual challenges for crime science”. The worse version was torturous!

A CPTED Framework Public Realm Scoping Paper was released two years ago. While it did an admirable job of covering CPTED history, particularly the Australian story, it read like exotic buffet where each tasty morsel was spread out without rhyme or reason.

HAVING YOUR CAKE AND EATING IT TOO

Framework tossed out ideas like "thermal comfort" and "empathic interaction" in willy nilly fashion. On one hand it slammed 2nd Generation CPTED theory as “superfluous second generation nomenclature” and then followed that up with this poster-child for superfluous:

“Whole area image, in a Gestalt sense, is very different from the meaning embedded in individual site characteristics… Past psycho-social experiences, role-models, somatic and genetic tendencies and inheritance, introvert-extroversion personality-typing, psychological stressor thresholds, 'get even' desires, thrill seeking, peer pressures, and gang membership, inter alia...encourage individuals considering a delinquent, anti-social or criminal activity to take action (or not)."


What?

Ironically the author then claims social programming has been part of CPTED all along. It hasn't! That’s why we created 2nd Generation CPTED in the first place.

Into this theoretical bucket the author scoops environmental, thermal, planning, and design cases as CPTED examples, all the while supporting bottom-up ideas similar to SafeGrowth ("local control is best practice"). But then we’re offered up cases such as a Viennese coffeehouse that "employs people suffering from mental handicaps…aiming to stabilize the personality of the participants."

What?

Framework is a frustrating read. There is a rich historical review in this paper. The author is clearly knowledgeable (in the 1990s he led pioneering research into fear mapping). Sadly this is not his best work. It is in dire need of a disciplined copy editor.

As luck would have it my next read was about Homer Simpson in an article about the emerging field of crime science!

CRIME SCIENCE GETS A FACELIFT

Last October Frontiers in Human Neuroscience published Naemie Bouhana's article, The reasoning criminal vs. Homer Simpson: Conceptual challenges for crime science.

It was concise, non-pretentious and penetrating. It described a new branch of criminology – crime science – as the study of crime prevention "chiefly concerned with the design of social and technological systems…an engineering discipline, with a self-confessed preference for short-term problem-solving."

I suspect crime science researchers see their role a bit broader. Last year their inaugural journal said crime science is about cutting crime opportunities. “In blocking opportunities for crime and terrorism we are not simply reducing the incidence, we are also removing one of the causes.”

Obviously CPTED is a practical piece that fits neatly into the center of that puzzle. Yet crime science has an Achilles Heel: "It is not possible to leave the offender out of crime prevention altogether. In order to “increase effort” and “reduce rewards”, a model of criminal decision-making is needed. For this purpose, the fathers of situational crime prevention adopted the Rational Choice Perspective (RCP).”

Bouhana claims that RCP "has fallen short as a model of offender decision-making." He explains why with a razor.

OCCAM - THE CAUSE-KILLING RAZOR

Occam's Razor says theories with the fewest assumptions are preferable to those more complex. Aristole said it first: all things being equal, theories that explain the world with fewer hypotheses are better. Science calls it parsimony.

The parsimony razor helps shave away the complex to arrive at the simplest solution. RCP is the perfect theory for crime reduction and opportunity the perfect tool cut it; cut the opportunity and you cut the crime. It is Occam’s Razor incarnate.

Bouhana says there are three arrows through the heel of RCP in crime science:

1. In strictly scientific terms, parsimony is never irrefutable. Especially in modern science, complexity often works best. RCP’s simplicity may be its weakness, not its strength.
2. When are all things ever equal in the social world? 
3. Einstein warned that a theory should never simplify to the point of sacrificing "the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." In other words, reducing prevention to “where” and “when” leaves out too many of the big questions, like “why”. 

In criminal behavior people don’t always act like Mr. Spock - logical and rational. Bouhana says crime science must expand to include new theories in neuroscience and behavioral geography. Those theories suggest people often behave irrationally, more like Homer Simpson, sometimes responding to the environment, sometimes not. Consider the well-known "By-stander Effect"; natural surveillance did nothing to stop the Kitty Genovese murder in New York.

"This state of affairs has had the consequence of stifling theoretical development in crime science, so much so that RCP has remained essentially static since the 1980s." This is exactly what many of us have said about 1st Generation CPTED for years.

In addition to neuroscience and behavioral geography, I’ve mentioned other theories in this blog that crime science might consider like emotional intelligence, the civilizing effect, and the public health concept.

These new theories are not parsimony. Like the criminal behavior they study, they are complex. Occam would not approve, though Einstein might.