The Mean Streets of San Francisco

The man lay in the median-strip shrubbery
on Webster (Google street view)

Hundreds of people drove or walked by the prone figure on February 4th.

Payal Gupta noticed from her second-floor window that the man hadn't moved for seven hours, and called 911.

Emergency units declared the man dead and cleared the scene at 2:49 a.m., 5½ hours after Ms. Gupta's 911 call.

The medical examiner’s office later identified the man as Dustin Walker. He was 37 and homeless. His cause of death is under investigation...

Scores of neighbors responded, several of them saying they’d seen people appearing to be asleep or unconscious on the street many times and had not known what to do.

Amid San Francisco’s triple crisis of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction, it’s common to see people in distress or simply passed out on the sidewalk. It’s such a familiar sight that many of us just walk on by.

This incident is partly an example of the bystander effect made famous by the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964:

The phenomenon, called the Bystander Effect or the Genovese Syndrome, attempts to explain why someone witnessing a crime would not help the victim.

Psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley made their careers studying the Bystander Effect and have shown in clinical experiments that witnesses are less likely to help a crime victim if there are other witnesses. The more witnesses, the less likely any one person will intervene.

It's easy to deplore San Franciscans' lack of compassion, but I don't believe that attribution is justified. There's too much risk of being infected or provoking a violent reaction from attempting to rouse a person lying on a sidewalk (some social workers advise tapping the soles of the subject's shoes).

The mean streets make everyone meaner.