Fri 6 Jun 2008
Look at the Hit and Run Video and Then Judge
Posted by Jim under Hartford , it's the stupid media , fake newsI just watched the infamous Park Street hit-and-run video and I didn’t reach the conclusion that the victim was ignored by bystanders. Less than a minute after the man was hit, several bystanders walked out into the road towards him. Less than ninety seconds after the accident a police car drove to the scene and he was attended to. It is true that several cars continued to drive by. You have to wonder what they were thinking. I chalk it up to the fact that some people have the notion that someone else will make the 911 call. But to me, the video clearly shows that a group of people walked out into the road to help this man before the police car pulled up.
What I would like to know is how did this incident take on the spin of callous city dwellers ignoring someone in distress? I see this more as the media creating a story where there was none. And then there are the wingnuts who take the distortion and add their own coat of slime. To call the hit-and-run accident a “Genovese moment” is breathtakingly stupid.
June 7th, 2008 at 7:56 am
I dunno Jim. I looked at the video and thought about all the things that I would expect/hope would happen if I or a loved one were in the same situation. A half dozen cars went by without stopping . . . people very tentatively stepped out into the street to check him out . . . nobody even got close enough to him to bend over him so I doubt that they made an effort to talk to him or see if he was conscious.
Dialing 911 does not, by itself, absolve a person of responsibility. Not when a human being gets smashed up like that right in front of your eyes.
No, this doesn’t have anything to do with people in Hartford being “bad people.” The first few vehicles to pass him by are big ol’ SUV’s and probably rolled in from the suburbs. And no, it’s not as bad as Kitty Genovese. But it is seriously fucked up.
June 7th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Peter,
I would ask you to put yourself in the picture and, in the span of less than 60 seconds, what would you have done differently? Approaching a body lying in a busy city street “tentatively” seems like a prudent thing to do. As my daughter said when she saw the video, “I would have been in shock right after seeing what happened.” In her case, she thought it probably would have taken her a few moments before she would have reacted. I think people are judging the bystanders much too harshly. Would they have approached the victim quicker if he had been lying on the sidewalk?
June 7th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Of course you’re going to be in shock, but you know what? There is a body in the road that was just hit by a car and it’s your job to do something.
Now, granted there were probably some people on the scene who didn’t see what happened but from the video it seems pretty clear that some people did. What would I do if I saw it happen? How about at least this:
1. Stop the car and get out (if driving)
2. Dial 911
3. Stop traffic
4. Yell to ask if anyone is a doctor
5. Make sure that either I or someone else is directing traffic around the victim
6. Approach the victim - actually get down on his level to see what’s going on, don’t gawk from the sidewalk
7. Talk to him to see if he is conscious
8. If he is conscious, reassure him that help is coming
Sure, if one or two people do this, I’m not going to complain that EVERYBODY didn’t jump in to help. But if NO ONE does these things then, yes, there is something seriously wrong.
And to turn it around, ask your daughter what she would have *wanted* strangers to do if they saw you being hit by a car in just this way . . . and ask yourself what you would *want* them to do if it was her.
Oh and one more thing. This is an old lawyer’s trick but it almost always surprises people when they say “oh it wasn’t long, only about a minute.” Look at the clock and mark when the second hand hits 12. Now start counting: The guy just got hit by a car . . . time is passing . . . no one is doing anything . . . Count off 90 seconds (the time til the cop arrived) and see if that doesn’t seem like one hell of a long time to be lying in the road waiting for somebody to remember that you’re a human being.
June 7th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Please, I wish other people would weigh in on this. I am really disappointed in how the media and many people are so hypercritical of bystander response. As I said, there were some people who ignored what happened and didn’t try to help, but I think there would have been similar results no matter where this happened.
Peter,
So your complaint is that people didn’t act quickly enough. As for my daughter, of course she would like people to respond as quickly as possible, but she also is aware that witnessing such a horrific event stops some people in their tracks. I think it would take me a moment or two to gather my wits enough to start taking action. The video clearly shows people did start to respond and then the police car drove up. Supposedly, the police received four 911 calls. We could go back and forth on whether the response time of the bystanders was reasonable. I think it was. You disagree.
Anybody else want to weigh in?
June 8th, 2008 at 7:12 am
I can’t even talk myself into watching it.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I had the same reaction as you did, Jim. I saw on the screen the several people move to check on the man, even as the idiot newscaster claimed that “people just passed on by.” This is a great example how the media cares little for the reality in front of them, and creates perception that works well for sensationalism.
90 seconds is pretty fast for a cop to arrive at ANY scene. The only reason the local news media feel this is a long time is because that’s about the longest story they ever run. It’s all relative.
June 8th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
The media use sound bites to warp people’s judgment on political issues and now we have video bites that distort people’s judgment of real life incidents. I would bet big bucks that videos of other accidents and crime scenes would show the same thing: some people taking action after a moment of shock, some people standing by and watching and others continuing about their business.
June 8th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Thanks for raising this dialogue Jim, esp in the HIMC blog, considering the relevance. I personally have many mixed feelings regarding this.
From a personal perspective I am with Steve that unfortunately I cannot move myself to watch the video clips. I didn’t watch the towers video clips until Micheal Moore’s video. Dunno, guess I don’t like being manipulated by controlled images from the media (though deeper than that). I still am in outrage at how the media used 15 to 30 seconds of selective video/audio clips to hang Rev Wright and Obama who could be considered a bystander to Wright’s clips.
I also wonder how much of an impact the ICE raids and police collusion had to do with at least a few of the bystanders.
I agree with Peter that there are simply humanistic steps that any caring person would take, if at least to console the person and stop other traffic. I know when I have been in serious auto related human and animal incidents, I find a moment of shock and hesitation followed by an instinct to assist in anyway I could. Personally I think it takes longer to process what are the consequences of my helping compared to coming to the aid of a human or animal in serious pain.
This is a horrific incident from so many perspectives and my heart goes out to Mr. Torres and his family. When I do drive my car in Hartford, I am so horridly cautious for sadly no one seems to give traffic a second thought in crossing the street and the drivers seem to think they own the road even though it is a city for god sakes!
I also find it ironic that so many folks are in outrage by inaction to go to the aid of someone hurt, yet for all practical purposes we (including myself) stand complicit as a government perpetuates its state sanctioned violence every single day, since the founding of these here dis-united states!
Personally I try to subscribe to the belief that each of us must be the change we seek in our world, no matter how fallible we may be at times. And so to respond to Chief Roberts, Hartford will reflect the compassion and caring that each of us as residents decide to give to it and its community.
June 9th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Luis Cotto, whose vision and love for Hartford is an inspiration to me, wrote his thoughts about this tragedy in this piece in the Courant.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:15 am
I apologize for not weighing in earlier…I haven’t seen many updates on the blog and had taken it out of my rotation
glad to see that your still plugging on.
I have to say that my initial reactions were made upon receiving the video from the police public information officer and not from any news source. I went home and had a really difficult conversation with my partner. What I saw disgusted me to the core. In retrospect probably because I am so intrinsically connected to Park Street that I guess it was more like a betrayal than say if it happened on Barbour Street in the Northend. Keep in mind…this is before seeing anything on any tv, any website, any national outlet…before any conversation was had I saw the video and felt the way I did.
Fast forward a couple days and it is now a big thing. Nationally, an example of a dying city, locally, a city in the midst of anarchy (due to the weeks events and the Chief’s comments) At this point I turn into Luis the nationalist…I defend Hartford because I know that what happened is not indicative of who lives here. I critique the media all the while understanding the whole “if it bleeds it leads” mentality that they all subscribe to to make a buck.
I submit to those who saw nothing out of the ordinary with this video (maybe that isn’t written correctly) to assess your own rationale. Are you putting yourself in the role of the Hartford defender? Would your assessment be different if you had seen the video before people had already editorialized it? I don’t know…I did, and I felt yucky to say the least.
Regardless, the damage is done and now people who give a crap think less of us.
I remember having an online conversation with a level 42 mage on Everquest a while ago (yes I roxored!!! woot!!) and I mentioned that I lived in Hartford…he (or she) replied that they knew Htfd a little…where did I live? I said Frog Hollow at which point they proceeded to go into how brave I was to live in such a bad neighborhood. Apparently he went to Trinity and was given special workshops by the school on the do’s and don’ts of living in this part of the city….great!!
So I proceeded to pepper him with my +20 arrows of eminent domain and looted him when he fell…heh-heh
sorry…I tend to digress at times
peace
June 9th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
[…] The situation is especially acute when there is a sense for city residents, in particular, that they are doing battle with the local paper, searching for genuine information and coming up short. Recent coverage in the Republican of the changing trash fee situation in Springfield seemed to bring up more questions than answers; in Hartford, the recent hit-and-run surveillance video that has now received widespread national attention got immediate front-page treatment online at the Courant, and has today elicited a kind of outrage from the editorial board that seems rather out of pace with what city residents are saying in reaction on their blogs (and, in two cases, actual newspaper columns). […]
June 9th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Okay. I have looked at the video and here is what I observe of the bystanders. i saw little meaningful reaction from anybody immediately after he was struck. People are not stopping in their tracks frozen in shock. They continue strolling down the sidewalk - in fact it reminds me of those wildlife movies in africa where a lion tears apart a gazelle in the presence of other gazelle’s, and the other gazelles, dumb, pee brained, in shock, or whatever it is that causes them to remain oblivious, remain so.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
I watched the video a couple of times. I’d say the hype is worse than what I saw, though I wasn’t very happy with what I saw. However, I’m not really sure what I expect people to do other than stand near the victim and maybe try to talk to him if he was conscious. I’m not sure what I would have done in that situation. I’ve been in other situations where after an accident or something like that I stopped to help and other times when I didn’t, though I don’t know what to do other than call 911. Not to mention there are many unknowns since we don’t have any audio. The police showed up pretty quickly (not sure if it was because of a call or coincidental).
I showed the video in my class and we had trouble coming to any real conclusions because we couldn’t hear anything. Some focused their criticism on the driver who hit the victim over the bystanders who appeared to do little to help. I guess that’s one question, assuming we’re not paramedics, what could the bystanders do? Maybe direct traffic away from the victim? If he were conscious I guess one could try to console him and tell him help is on the way. There might also be the possibility that some of the people driving by (assuming they didn’t see the initial hit) thought the incident was the result of some type of organized crime or something like that, and so they figured the best thing to do is to pretend they don’t see anything (just to throw out that idea). Not to mention, it’s always easier to critique these things from home where we can think rationally and calmly than when something like this catches us off guard. Basically, I don’t know what to think..there are just to many unknowns.
June 10th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I can hear it when Peter calls out for people to act, because I know him to be somebody who works to end injustice everywhere. But it’s been hard lately, listening to so many self-righteous people talking about Hartford, when I know that many of them specifically live in the suburbs, for the purpose of removing themselves from the pain and struggle of Hartford’s poor people. Really, how many white parents are left in Hartford? And are they okay with detaching themselves from the pain people are going through?
My neighbor sends her daughter to our house, because they have no money for groceries. My friend (single mom) can’t afford hot water—and couldn’t take warm showers this winter. Yesterday I met a man who just came out of jail who has no job and no place to live.
Our society seems to say it’s NOT okay to stand by if a car hits someone (front page–national media attention), but it IS okay to stand by if someone is hungry, sick or homeless.
June 14th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I think the time wasted before anyone helped this man is sickening and the drivers are deplorable. Though, I’m not surprised. People on Park Street don’t care. We are spending millions improving the street, yet the littering is shocking. Go there for lunch and see where people drop their trash. Anywhere.
June 17th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
The local media is just out there to make money. They don’t give a rats ass about anything.
Thats why we have taken it in our hands to expose the brutal reality of Hartford’s media business.
See you soon!