At 3:15 on a recent Friday afternoon, a 1959
green Oldsmobile was parked alongside the curb in a middle-class
residential neighborhood of New York City. Two men got out, removed the
license plates, and opened the hood slightly to make the car look as if
it had been stolen or left alone while its owner went for help. Then
they withdrew to a nearby window, where—unseen—they could watch what
was to happen.Vice squad cops bent on entrapment?No. In fact, the two men were psychologists, interested in the varieties
of human response to the sight of an obviously unguarded, abandoned
car. Within ten minutes, their vehicle received its first visitors. The
researchers' log reads, in chilling ellipsis: “Family of three drive
by, stop. All leave car. Well-dressed mother with Saks Fifth Avenue
shopping bag stands by car on sidewalk keeping watch. Boy, about eight
years old, stays by father throughout, observing and helping. Father,
dressed in neat sport shirt, slacks and windbreaker, inspects car,
opens trunk, rummages through; opens own car trunk full of tools,
removes hacksaw, cuts for one minute. Lifts battery out and puts it in
his trunk. Lifts entire radiator out, places it on back floor of his
car. Family drives off.”Casual Observers. The whole operation took only seven minutes. While it
was going on, the log notes, “A young man and woman in a car pull up
behind the Olds; both get out, go up to back of Olds, inspect it while
father is sawing. They watch him and then leave. Two men around 35
years old walk by and observe the father sawing. They walk on.”Scott Fraser, a social psychologist at New York University, was one of
the observers who kept round-the-clock vigils over the car for 64
hours. What surprised him was that most of the car stripping took place
in broad daylight. All of the theft was done by clean-cut, well-dressed
middle-class people. Furthermore, the major theft and damage was always
observed by someone else. “Sometimes passersby would engage in casual
conversation with the miscreants,” says Fraser.By the end of the first 26 hours, a steady parade of vandals had removed
the battery, radiator, air cleaner, radio antenna, windshield wipers,
right-hand-side chrome strip, hubcaps, a set of jumper cables, a gas
can, a can of car wax, and the left rear tire . Nine hours later, random destruction began
when two laughing teen-agers tore off the rearview mirror and began
throwing it at the headlights and front windshield.Into the Carriage. Eventually, five eight-year-olds claimed the car as
their private playground, crawling in and out of it and smashing the
windows. One of the last visitors was a middle-aged man in a camel's
hair coat and matching hat, pushing a baby in a carriage. He stopped,
rummaged through the trunk, took out an unidentifiable part, put it in
the baby carriage, and wheeled off.
