![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
L.A. woman dies after writhing in pain for 45 minutes on emergency room floor while ignored by hospital staff; 911 hangs up, police attempt to arrest her.
Wow. Just... wow. The bystander effect can be a truly terrifying thing, can't it? The article quotes a source saying the police have no culpability and, from others, the fault appears to be thought to lie with the triage nurse who ignored the patient, but the triage nurse was hardly the only person present for three quarters of an hour while this patient writhed on the floor.
When people lack a known socially accepted response to a situation and are being observed by other members of the group, they tend to freeze and not respond, particularly when that response crosses a social boundary such as interference with a stranger in a public place. (The nurse's official authority probably helped enforce that inaction here.) This is a gruesome thing to think about, let alone to witness.
When I was in middle school, my mother and I were passing through the lobby of a large hotel when a young man got his pants stuck in the metal gears at the bottom of the lobby escalator. The fabric got sucked in and his leg was in serious danger of following. A woman nearby ran to his aid and tried to hold him out of the gears while my mother and I looked around for a non-existent off-switch, then approached the lobby desk. The man was in full view of the desk worker if she cared to stand up, but it still took two hotel employees and five minutes of urgent attempts to convince them before my mother or I could get them to dial 911. They could hear the woman and the man crying for help; they were frozen in indecision. To this day I'm not sure how long it really took because it was so bizarre; it was like time itself slowed down, for me, in a syrup of horror. When an ambulance finally arrived - and someone from the hotel, I think, finally managed to kill the escalator - the young man was carried out on a stretcher. We were told he would have been much more severely injured if the escalator had been left on for just a little longer.
Wow. Just... wow. The bystander effect can be a truly terrifying thing, can't it? The article quotes a source saying the police have no culpability and, from others, the fault appears to be thought to lie with the triage nurse who ignored the patient, but the triage nurse was hardly the only person present for three quarters of an hour while this patient writhed on the floor.
When people lack a known socially accepted response to a situation and are being observed by other members of the group, they tend to freeze and not respond, particularly when that response crosses a social boundary such as interference with a stranger in a public place. (The nurse's official authority probably helped enforce that inaction here.) This is a gruesome thing to think about, let alone to witness.
When I was in middle school, my mother and I were passing through the lobby of a large hotel when a young man got his pants stuck in the metal gears at the bottom of the lobby escalator. The fabric got sucked in and his leg was in serious danger of following. A woman nearby ran to his aid and tried to hold him out of the gears while my mother and I looked around for a non-existent off-switch, then approached the lobby desk. The man was in full view of the desk worker if she cared to stand up, but it still took two hotel employees and five minutes of urgent attempts to convince them before my mother or I could get them to dial 911. They could hear the woman and the man crying for help; they were frozen in indecision. To this day I'm not sure how long it really took because it was so bizarre; it was like time itself slowed down, for me, in a syrup of horror. When an ambulance finally arrived - and someone from the hotel, I think, finally managed to kill the escalator - the young man was carried out on a stretcher. We were told he would have been much more severely injured if the escalator had been left on for just a little longer.
