He said 'stop'.

Edit : it is a poor cthulu follower joke btw :s

Here is another scenario....

On a TV show they got someone to lay on the ground at a train station and see if anyone would help them, but all the people walked past. And the theme was how terrible all those people are

Couple of months later someone approached a person laying on the ground at a train station and got stabbed and killed because the person laying on the ground was on drugs or something and freaked out.

I don't know what the morel of the story is here,,,? i suppose if you managed to survive a stabbing after trying to help someone, you have a right to walk past the next person you see lying on the ground?


Edit: kudos to our emergency service personnel who have to deal with this type of thing every day!

Yeah well, I think prisons where you are are significantly less hellish than the ones here.

That's an extremely risky experiment.

You can say "you" directly instead of all of your 'he hims it that person', and appealing to ignorance is also a fallacy.

By definition the right thing cannot be wrong, except in a pointless paradox like "this sentence is a lie" or "it's right to be wrong!". Whether we know what it is or not is irrelevant. All we have are choices and what we think those align best with.

I would, simply by showing up. My badass-itude is on the Shaft level. And I don't mean Samuel L "I Sold Out To The Man In Those Capital One Commercials" Jackson-Shaft. I mean the real Shaft: Richard Mofuggin Roundtree. Except I'd be the white version which is, say, 90% Black Shaft and still at least 8% better than Sammy the Sellout. So I'd walk around the corner and all the bad goings-on would stop, like right-the-hell-now. The kidnappers would immediately make amends by buying everyone present a DQ Blizzard, and a gift card. "Sorry about that, Mr White Shaft. Don't know what I was thinking! Tell Chuck Norris 'hi'."

Yeah, I'm so badass I resurrected Chuck Norris. How you like that shit?

Shut up. I don't give a crap if you like it. You'll take it regardless. Now go run on home and tell yo' mama I said 'hey'.




Okay, I'd like to think I'd jump in and do something but you never know how you'll react. Good intentions is one thing and mental planning is another, but both can be overcome by the sheer WTFedness of the situation. And if they were Hollywood-style kidnappers, all black-van and throwing a hood over the head and sporting guns, I'd be lucky to get the phone out in time to take a pic for evidence. But I do have this knack for getting numbers stuck in my head so if I saw the license plate, they'd be toast.

Certainly a fair argument, not exactly sure what an assault charge would get you in AU or what their prisons are like (I realize you're US)

Would I stop a kidnapping? No, I need the money.
Would I stop a kid napping? Christ, no! I'm glad the little bugger finally fell asleep!

the same experiment was made in Germany with equal mixed results.
you can't give an absolute sure answer about helping or not.
this is an stress situation.and only after you have gone through such situation you can be sure and/or readjust your reaction.
one of the reasons why police/military train.

Now this one was about a kid. Like i said the experiment was made in Germany too.
And many helped the kid. But they made it with different scenarios, from young adult male/female to older persons asking for
help. Here the results were not very encouraging. Nobody helped the young male.

Never wake a sleeping baby!!

Quite often under pressure people tend to freeze up, I'm not sure whether or not I'd be able to intervene. I would like to think I would be able to help, but I think I would more likely freeze. Hopefully I'd be able to do something, but I've never been in that situation before. Hard to say.

If the kidnapper has a gun, and I'm unarmed, the smart thing to do would to call the police and try to remember whatever details are available to help the authorities track the bastard down. Me against the gun = dead, I do not have the power to stop a bullet and unlike the movies more than likely the bad guys will not have their guns set on "miss"

I think it is sad that the kid's biggest fear is getting kidnapped, poor little boy. :( When I was a kid, I didn't have that kind of fear.

There can be lots of reasons why they are not reacting:

"Why is no one else reacting? Are they shooting some movie, or is this candid camera? If this is real, does the assailant have a gun or a knife? Where is the police or security? Should I call the cops?"

Also, it takes some time from a person walking on the street to transform oneself from "minding my own business la-di-da-di-daa..." => "Huh? WTF is happening?" => "Action mode enabled!". It doesn't happen instantly. Also some people are simply so shocked of suddenly seeing violence, blood and guts that it alone makes them less capable of acting. Not all people are trained security personnel, knowing how to handle the stress etc..

It is hard to say without being there yourself how the incident appeared. I have hard time believing it would be normally about the bystanders just not caring, shrugging their shoulders indifferently.

What irritates me most are those f*cking teenage girls who start screaming for help on the street just because their boyfriend tickles them. If you reacted fast and yelled to the guy to let go (because you thought there is a rape or a murder going on), you'd next have both the guy and his girlfriend kicking your nutsacks. As said, you first want to understand what is really happening, before you react.

But yeah, I have reacted to some things I've seen outside, like seeing from inside the bus that some big drunkard was beating up a smaller drunkard, so I called the cops. I don't know if many others did too. The stupid thing is that I first called the emergency number (112, similar to 911 in US), and they said there I should call the cops instead. Why the heck they couldn't transfer my call to cops then? I had to ask them "Ok, so what is the number to police then?", and call them separately.

Then again, a few days ago I heard some muffled shouting downstairs. I didn't go on their door to pound the door, or even called the cops. Should I have done that? Hard to say. Similarly I don't run outside instantly whenever I hear one shout outside.

One example that has been used that if there is a drown victim on a beach, some people rush to help (if they have any idea how to help), some freeze (without knowing what to do), and some even run away, trying to block the horrific image (of someone dying) from their mind. By their nature, people are different and react differently. However, I do not think there are bystanders who are just being indifferent, as if they didn't care.

Naturally people can train themselves to such stress situations. So a medic doesn't freeze when giving mouth to mouth to a drunkard, or a security personnel in a restaurant have lots of experience how to react to crazy people and troublemakers. For untrained people, the reaction can even go overboard, ie. when you go to help someone, you yourself become so crazy from the situation and the adrenaline that your "helping" goes a bit overboard. It is not as easy to keep one's cool in stressful confrontations as kung fu movies suggest.

I would try to help (and already have, not in a kidnapping but something similar). What's the worst that could happen if I do? If I'm in the US I might be shot, true. So I might loose my life. Big deal.
But if I don't help I would have to live with the knowledge that I could have helped, but didn't. That's worse.

It depends, really. If I'm sure I'm in front of a real kidnapping, I would evaluate the risks: if the kidnapper is only one, I would probably intervene in first person since I think I could handle a fight if things start to get bad; if the kidnappers are more, I would imediately call for police backup while staying unnoticed, meanwhile memorizing as many details as I can, like the faces of the criminals and the boy to identify them later, the number plate of the car, if possible, their words and movements and so on. Running recklessly into danger is not only useless, but also counter-productive: you wouldn't help the victim while endangering yourself, with the only result to worsen the situation.

For the original article, I don't quite see what the point was. Was it a test whether the people believed the kid, or the person playing their father?

Think of it. Would a real kidnapper come to talk to you face to face? Wouldn't he simply run away after he sees his target (the kid) is pleading for help already? It could well be many people figured it out like that, ie. it was an antisocial kid who likes to cause trouble to his parents, especially if the actor playing the father was very convincing.

And even then, quite many test subjects did the right thing, ie. decided to halt the situation, maybe call the police so they can check what's the deal here. I'm not sure about the woman who used pepper spray on the "father", maybe that was a bit of overreacting, unless he was really trying to pull or carry the screaming child away?

Frankly, I don't know how I would have reacted. Maybe differently on different days. Most probably I would have tried to reach the security the clear the situation, or at least I wish I would have. Then again, in another confrontation that happened to me, it occurred to me only later that I should have contacted the security (it was a case when someone picked a fight with me, while I was unwilling to fight; I kicked myself to head for not contacting the security after the incident, I could have gotten the guy to a lot of trouble. How stupid of me, but then you don't necessarily think rationally and logically in a stressful situation). Depends what they did. If they decided to give the assailant a lesson by beating him to pulp when there was no more danger to the victim, then I can understand that they got charged as well. Someone breaking the law does not grant you the right to break it too.

I think the idea is pretty clear at least here: you can use as much force as is needed to stop the dangerous situation, not more. There's some leeway there of course because you can't always know beforehand what would have been just the right amount of force, or the proper course of action.

Then again, as they say, better be charged than dead.