But New Yorkers were traumatized as well. It crystallized what people were only beginning to feel about urban life in America: the anonymity, the lack of human contact, the feeling of not being able to control one's environment.

''The case touched on a fundamental issue of the human condition, our primordial nightmare,'' Dr. Milgram said. ''If we need help, will those around us stand around and let us be destroyed or will they come to our aid? Are those other creatures out there to help us sustain our life and values or are we individual flecks of dust just floating around in a vacuum?''

Morton Bard, professor of psychology at the City University's Graduate Center, and others agreed that the Genovese case focused attention on the needs of the victim. ''It occurred at the very beginning of what has turned out to be the longest and most sustained crime wave in this country's history,'' Professor Bard said. Crime has gone up 300 percent in the last 20 years, according to Justice Department officials attending the conference.

''It mobilized people's thinking around the need for society to respond to the victimization of people,'' Professor Bard said. ''The victim had become a person without a voice in criminal proceedings.''

In the years since, neighborhood watch committees and private security patrols have become common. Many places now have a central 911 emergency telephone number. Many states have passed ''Good Samaritan'' laws that relieve a person of liability when he helps in emergencies. Victim Compensation Laws

Thirty-seven states now have victim compensation laws, and three have duty-to-intervene statutes. Lobbying groups have sprung up to protect the rights of the victim, and crime-stoppers units with payment for anonymous tips are common in big city police departments.

Two weeks after the Genovese murder had passed nearly unnoticed, The New York Times reported its discovery that ''for more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman'' and did not call the police. The story, retracing the investigation with detectives, said witnesses offered several reasons for their inaction:

''We thought it was a lovers' quarrel.''

''Frankly, we were afraid.''

''I was tired.''

The police called it apathy. Dr. Harold Takooshian, an assistant professor of psychology at Fordham, said that through voluminous studies, social scentists now believed that apathy was a factor in the Genovese case but was probably too simple a term for what happened.