Conspiracy of Silence

Returning to his Manhattan apart ment one night, CBS Correspondent Hughes Rudd was mugged, robbed and left sprawled and bloodied on the street.

Four hours later, as he finally stirred back to consciousness, a passing patrolman asked him what had happened and whether he needed an ambulance.

Rudd stubbornly declined aid and limped home. The policeman did not bother to take down his name; except for a call to his credit-card companies, Rudd made no effort to report the as sault. "What was the use?" he sighs.

More and more Americans are ask ing themselves the same question. Despite the "law and order" drive, the public adamantly refuses to report many crimes. According to the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, only about one-half of the rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries and major larcenies that are committed in the U.S. each year manage to get onto the police blotter.

Crime Tolerance. Nowhere is public and police indifference greater than in the big cities, where the violent-crime rate is already five times higher than in rural areas. Harassed, overworked and underpaid, metropolitan police often are not only unable but unwilling to deal with any except the most serious lawen forcement problems. In Detroit, for ex ample, until the city installed a new computerized data-collecting system, many precinct lieutenants let their officers ignore the most obvious signs of burglary -- pry marks on a door -- and list only a broken window.

City dwellers glumly accept crime as an inevitable hazard. Despairing of ever recovering stolen goods or bringing criminals to account, they decide that silence is the better part of wisdom. After his car was ransacked, Long Island's Democratic Congressman Allard K.

Lowenstein echoed the feelings of many of his constituents: "I didn't call the po lice because I was busy, because re porting takes so much time, and be cause it is so hard to get the police interested."

Public apathy may also be a mea sure of what Wayne State Sociologist Joseph L. Albini calls a community's "crime tolerance." Middle-class white mothers, for example, rarely let gang at tacks on their children go unreported.

Ghetto mothers, however, may well re gard such incidents as necessary tests of their youngsters' ability to survive the slum's daily violence. Often, of course, Negro slum dwellers not only passively accept crime but also actively admire the criminals -- especially if their victims are white. Many Harlemites, said a local N.A.A.C.P. official recently, "seem to have the idea that [black criminals] are some sort of 20th century Robin Hoods."

Sweaty Palms. Beyond sociological reasons lie the personal fears, guilt and shame of the victim himself. Police rarely hear from the businessman who has been robbed by a prostitute. They are even less likely to get a complaint from the hoodlum who has been threatened by the Mafia or the teen-ager who has paid for pot and got oregano instead. In instances of child molesting, some parents are either too ashamed themselves to go to the police or want to spare their youngsters further embarrassment.

Perhaps the most socially significant kind of public silence involves bystanders who are unwilling to intervene or call police when crimes occur before their eyes. Yet are such silent witnesses really as apathetic as social critics usually portray them? Perhaps not. In what the American Association for the Advancement of Science calls 1968's best sociopsychological research, Professors John M. Darley of Princeton and Bibb Latane of Ohio State portray homo urbanus in an entirely different light. Testing the reaction of college students to a feigned emergency, they found that the emotions of those who remained quiet hardly registered what could be called indifference. Often their hands trembled, their palms sweated. If anything, they were more nervous than those who reported the crisis. "The bystander," conclude Darley and Latane, is, in fact, "an anguished individual in genuine doubt, concerned to do the right thing but compelled to make complex decisions under pressure of stress and fear."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.