Bystander Thought

Before we began studying and viewing the different videos about the Human Case Studies, it reminded me of something that happened to me a while ago, while in class we were trying to define bystander and if someone has the need to act. I remember when I was in the sixth grade, a group of my friends and I went into Target and were just screwing around. As we were leaving and paying for our stuff, one of my friends slips a pretty good sized bag of chips into his bag and keeps walking without paying for them. I notice and try to tell him to just pay for the bag of chips but he kept saying nah and just walked out of the store with them and didn't get caught. Since he walked out and no one tried stopping him to have him pay for the food he took, I just felt like it was something not worth to go back and rat on my friend. But as time went on, my friend started to steal more and more and eventually began to get caught almost regularly for shop lifting, not the best thing to have on a record. Looking back on the whole situation, I feel like I did a disservice to him and hugely let him down by not effectively "telling on him", because maybe if he had learned from his mistake early in his life, then maybe he wouldn't have tried doing it more and more. Since I was kind of like a bystander in this situation, I feel now as if I had a responsibility for stopping him from doing this illegal activity before, instead of letting him get sucked into this habit. I've regretted this so much and I just hope he's doing better now, but it really got me thinking about the responsibility of a bystander.