The chilling video of two teenage girls fighting in the street circulated on social media for days. What most grabs a viewer’s attention — even more than the brutality with which the girls are attacking each other — is the jeering mob circling around them.
Dozens of people, at least a few filming the scene with their cell phones, can be seen and heard moving in to surround the Sept. 24 brawl in the middle of Macomber Street. They gruesomely cheer the combatants on. It looks and sounds like blood lust.
The scene leaves most viewers sick to their stomachs, wondering, “Why didn’t anyone call police?”
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It was an 85-year-old woman who saw the brawl from her home across the street who eventually called 911 to report the fight. It was too late, as it turned out, to prevent a shooting that followed the hand-to-hand combat and left one teenage girl dead and another wounded.
A Toledo 16-year-old has been charged in the shootings.
If someone had called just 10 minutes earlier, police said, officers could have been dealing with a fight — not a murder.
The sickening scene played out like something one might expect in larger, more violent cities like Chicago or Detroit. Earlier this year after a similar street brawl in which two women were stabbed, Detroit’s police chief threatened to arrest anyone who filmed the melee but did not intervene or call 911.
“As far as I’m concerned, you’re an actor in this,” the chief said.
But legal experts corrected the chief: Bystanders may have a moral responsibility to do something, but not a legal one.
In some neighborhoods, witnesses do not feel safe to report crimes. To call the cops risks being labeled a snitch, who then becomes a target.
That is a problem that must be addressed as a community by rooting out criminal elements, investing in neighborhoods to make them safe and livable, and continuing to build good relationships between residents and the police department that protects them.
But even if the people who witnessed the Toledo brawl were too afraid to call police, there is no excuse for the way they did react.
Dozens of people with phones in their hands were using those phones to record the fight and not one person used a phone to call 911.
There is a difference between a witness and a bystander.
Violence tears at the fabric of a community. Violent crime in a community where people do not feel safe enough to call police erodes the rule of law.
Society has become too accustomed to experiencing the world through smartphones and social media — observing events and consuming posts about them from a detached perspective. But there are human beings on the other side of the screen. Instead of detaching from the situation, people must detach from the device and show human decency.
First Published October 8, 2017, 4:15 a.m.