They'll post a video on Youtube without calling for help

it was late at night...we ran down the stairs (we lived on the 4th floor). On our way down we knocked on the 3rd floor residents of what it was we heard and asked them to call the police.

We went downstairs to find a foreign sailor bleeding...after a time, when no police showed up, my mother sent me back upstairs to call the police.

Seems the neighbors did not want to get involved and failed to call.

Turned out the two women residents in the basement apartment planned to rob and assault him...not sure if they were willing to kill?

I remember Kitty Genovese cause I was nic named Kitty too.

then I don't see how a private citizen can reasonably be held to a higher standard.

If the SCOTUS threw out the whole "serve and protect" fairytale, it would seem that good samaritan laws are at least equally untenable.

SCOTUS is full of corporate hacks

That's not to say I wouldn't hope for a private citizen to intervene, but if heavily armed and armored law enforcement professionals are legally permitted to stand by while a person is beaten to death, then a private citizen must certainly be afforded that same latitude.

I'm assuming *somebody* had a cell phone. Sweet Jumping Jeebus, what a crap race the human can be.

There's a movie--I think on Netflix--that I'm trying to steel myself to watch called "The Witness" made by Kitty Genovese's brother. He interviewed the witnesses to her murder who allegedly did nothing to help her.

We're an awful species - mememememememmemememmememme

but many of us aren't decent

. . .i have to admit to feeling uncomfortable about a law that makes people intervene. Would i have? Yes. Would i expect most everyone else to do so? Yep.

Still don't like it being a law.

It is not too much to ask from someone to call emergency services in case of an emergency. The law also requires everyone to help in a medical emergency situation if possible, but I think just calling for help is the required minimum. To be quite honest, maybe I would have done the same and assumed the guy is homeless and just needed a warm place to sleep, and maybe would have decided not to annoy him… Bad mistake.

There is a problem with this law, because in cases of rational suicide (e.g. your terminally ill father wants to kill himself because he wants to end the suffering), this makes things even worse. You need plausible deniability ("I didn't know my father was going to kill himself!" ) so basically you must leave him alone at this difficult time. Another issue is that it's difficult for a doctor to assist with suicide, i.e. doctors are not allowed to put someone to sleep even if they ask for it and there is an ethical argument to do it. I think they can provide deadly medication in some circumstances (though that's in legal limbo as well) the patient needs to take on his own with nobody around. I understand where the strict laws are coming from, since the Nazis basically embraced suicide for everyone who's not a perfect (according to their perverted standards) human being, and if that didn't work out, they took matters into their own hands and just killed people.