On January 28th a 15-year-old girl was brutally beaten in a Seattle public bus terminal. As can be seen on the security tape that captured the entire incident, the three security guards present—clearly visible in their neon yellow vests—did not intervene as the victim was jumped from behind by another girl, punched, and then repeatedly kicked in the head after falling to the ground. ABC News reports the girl was worried that
“ ‘these kids were trying to jump her,’ ” so she went right to the security guards to tell them her concern, and then stood behind the guards as the attacker approached. The victim told investigators, “ ‘I thought the security guards would defend me.’ ” Though the incident happened right in front of the guards—in fact, “one security guard can be seen standing directly over the victim as she is stomped and then kicked in the head by a teenage girl”—they did nothing to physically stop the attacker who “walked casually away” afterwards, only to come back for one last kick. The guards work for Olympic Security Services Inc., a firm contracted by King County to help the Metro police. According to the agreement, CNN.com quotes, “ ‘unarmed security guards are instructed not to intervene when witnessing suspicious behavior or criminal activity, but to ‘observe and report’ and radio the Metro Transit Control Center, which relays requests for assistance to the appropriate law enforcement agencies.’ ” Though King County Executive Dow Constantine released a statement saying, “ ‘Public safety is our top priority. I am appalled by the sight of uniformed guards standing by while a person was kicked and beaten,’ ” NY Daily News writes that “King County Sheriff’s Sgt. John Urquhart said the guards were right to follow their training.” The protocol is currently being reviewed.
Bystander Behavior
Facing Today helps educators connect the study of history to issues in our world today. We select current websites, articles, films and blogs that reflect universal themes, such as identity, membership and participation, represented in our scope and sequence. Each media resource is linked to related Facing History materials, including study guides, videos and lessons.
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February 12, 2010
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January 29, 2010
This week in history, 65 years ago, Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Soviets. January 27th was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In an op-ed article for The New York Times, Samuel Pisar, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, writes of his experience when the camps were liberated. Pisar expresses his concern that, as the last living Holocaust survivors are dying, “soon, history will speak about Auschwitz with the impersonal voice of researchers and novelists at best, and at worst in the malevolent register of revisionists and falsifiers who call the Nazi Final Solution a myth”—a process that has already begun. Because survivors are disappearing, Pisar says that “those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to humankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the power to enflame theirs, too.”
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November 4, 2009
Irmela Mensah-Schramm is on a mission to remove neo-Nazi graffiti across the city of Berlin. Spiegel Online reports that the 63-year-old self-proclaimed “political cleaning lady of the nation” has been removing far right slogans and neo-Nazi graffiti—what she calls “Nazi muck”—for over 20 years. In 1986, social worker Mensah-Schramm was on her way to work when she saw a sticker at a bus stop demanding freedom for a convicted Nazi war criminal. The sticker “disgusted her and she wanted to tear it off,” but she was in a hurry. All day long she couldn’t get the sticker out of her mind. That evening, when she returned to the bus stop, the sticker was still there. Spiegel Online reports that “she couldn’t understand why the many people who had waited at the bus stop that day hadn’t bothered to remove it. ‘So I decided to stop looking the other way.’ ” Mensah Schramm says “she has removed more than 80,000 stickers and daubings in the last 23 years—far-right, homophobic, anti-Semitic or racist slogans.”
