Filming the rape
Bystanders who stood by and failed to help a woman raped on a Philadelphia commuter train last week may face criminal charges, authorities have said. Authorities say that CCTV cameras show that bystanders on the train “did nothing” as the assault took place.
Police added that some of the bystanders may have been filming the incident instead of calling police.
Wtf???????
A man has been arrested for the rape.
The alleged rape took place last Wednesday on a train belonging to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (Septa). In a statement, Septa said that “there were other people on the train who witnessed this horrific act, and it
may[might] have been stopped sooner if a rider called 911″. A Septa employee who boarded the train called police, who found the victim and took the suspect into custody.
While the passengers sat around watching the rape on their phones, I guess.
At a news conference on Monday, police said that they do not believe any witnesses called 911 as the woman was harassed and eventually raped over the course of more than 40 minutes.
…
“I can tell you that people were holding their phone up in the direction of this woman being attacked,” Septa police chief Thomas J Nestel said on Monday. “What we want is everyone to be angry and disgusted and to be resolute about making the system safer,” Mr Nestel added.
Timothy Bernhardt, superintendent of the Upper Darby Police Department, was quoted by the New York Times as saying that bystanders who failed to help could face criminal charges if they recorded the incident.
Before reading this horror story I was reading another one, about the shift from spiking women’s drinks when they’re not looking to INJECTING them.
This was RIGHT THERE on the train and people did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING?
In many ways, the US is a third-world country. Possibly worse.
Maybe they were so wrapped up in being so proud of themselves for “gathering evidence” that they forgot that phones are, actually, phones.
Welcome to 1964. Kitty Genovese, only worse.
I had thought, for a while there, that we had made *some* progress in the last 60 years. Evidently not.
maddog,
But let’s remember that the Kitty Genovese story (by which I mean, the version that was in popular circulation for decades) was heavily distorted.
This sounds like a terrible story, but I would pump the brakes a bit on drawing any conclusion about the depravity of our society. There’s a lot of “police claim” and “may have happened” in the current account. (I’m not questioning whether an assault occurred, just the stuff about a bunch of spectators sitting idly by filming.)
Thanks, Screechy, saved me the trouble. I used to use the Kitty Genovese story as part of my lecture in critical thinking, as an example of conventional wisdom. Had to quit; the students took the opposite message. No matter how I worded it, they insisted on believing the distorted story, which they never heard before my class. So I decided to stop contributing to the stupidity of…well, not minors, because they are adults, but to oldsters like myself, they just seem like kids.
And now we already have the walkback on this story, according to the D.A.
One thing noted in that article is that the original account given by the authorities and the accompanying threats of prosecution of the witnesses were counterproductive: if you were on that train and thought you might have seen something, why would you come forward to the authorities and risk being charged yourself? The D.A.’s office is currently having to reassure potential witnesses of the actual rape that they should come forward.