Where’s the empathy?

Like most contracted security guards, Seattle’s Metro Transit Police are instructed not to intervene in any suspicious behavior or criminal activity. But rather, they are ordered to “observe and report.” This mandate essentially requires the unarmed guard to play the part of impotent citizen: unable and unwilling to do anything useful except call 911.

On Jan. 28, a 15-year-old girl was beaten and robbed in a Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel while three security guards did nothing but observe and report. The victim was fleeing a group of 10 teenagers who had just threatened her at a nearby Macy’s.

“I went to the security and told them that these kids were trying to jump me,” she told ABCNews.com. “I thought the security guards would defend me.”

A video of the incident shows the three guards dawdling about like unsure school boys, mere feet away from the victim as she is being repeatedly kicked and beaten on the ground.

Thankfully, the victim survived, only sustaining bruising and hair loss, but a differently angled kick or a stronger head-to-pavement collision could have resulted in far worse injury.

If the guards had intervened, they would have been violating their company’s policy and would most likely have been fired. They would also have been susceptible to multiple lawsuits. Yet, I still think their inaction is inexcusable.

It may have been their job to not intervene, and they certainly performed that job effectively, but how about their job as human beings? How can someone let corporate mandated callousness eclipse human compassion?

There is something so basic, so biological, to an eruption of physical violence that it seems implausible for the clothed technicians of corporate rule to possibly negotiate with it. I’m appalled that a company specializing in security can command its employees not to help a person in immediate danger, but it’s even more distressing to think that three of its employees ultimately sided with an on-paper protocol instead of a helpless girl being beaten and robbed only feet away. For the security guards present in that horrific instance, I’m sure there was no easy answer as to what course of action to take, but there was damn sure a right one.

The guards’ actions recall psychologist Stanley Milgram’s 1961 study on obedience, which demonstrated an individual’s capacity to willingly obey orders, even if the orders were to inflict physical harm on another human being. In the study, participants were commanded to administer electric shocks to a stranger they believed to be another volunteer. The participants could hear the stranger’s screams of pain and pleas for mercy but continued following instructions to increase the voltage. 

I am dismayed by the choices the three security guards made, as I am dismayed by the companies that dictate these types of actions, as it evidences our species’ continuing capability to conform to standards that violate our conscience. As novelist C.P. Snow wrote, “When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”


E-mail: joskraus@indiana.edu