We put a great deal of faith in men and women who don a police
badge and set out upon the streets looking for criminals. Police officers are
largely a noble and honest bunch, but the bad ones infect the whole system and
they rot it from the inside out.
In New York City ,
five teens were arrested for a violent rape they never participated in. The
police had no reason to suspect them except that they were up to no good, or
"wilding," in Central Park the same
night. With no evidence against the young men, police detectives laid into them
during 30-hour interrogations, eventually getting them to admit that they were
at the rape, but didn't join in. The boys were told if they admitted to
witnessing the crime they could go home.
So, without food, sleep or attorneys, the teens each filmed
confessions admitting to things they didn't do. Nevermind that the police had
coached their answers, altered timelines, given them bogus information based on
bad hunches, and then ignored how none of the confessions made much sense when
added together. The police had decided one cold fact: these young men were
guilty, and to prove it they would have to reverse engineer their crime.
All of this is rolled out in a devastating documentary, The Central Park Five, about the young
men, now all in their late 30s. The film does a deliberate and thorough job to
place the film firmly in 1989, when the rape occurred. Crime had not yet begun
to drop in New York City .
Shootings, stabbings and sexual assaults were common. Alleys were dark and
dangerous. Muggings were so frequent many New Yorkers stopped reporting them. White
stock traders and executives boarded graffiti-covered subways. Black teens
played basketball in the street.
The city was thrown into a firestorm the night the Central Park
Jogger was violently beaten and raped near a crossbridge in the northern half
of the park. Several sources within the film suggest that the crime was a
"perfect storm" of buzzwords: White woman. Rape. Central
Park . Black suspects. One official said that if the rape had taken
place in any other park — just not the famous Central Park
— we wouldn't know the story today. Another points to a black rape victim from
the previous month, a story that no one cared about because it didn't have
enough buzzwords.
The movie hits the racial angle of the case hard, even bringing
up the 1955 case of Emmett Till, the black youth who playfully whistled at a
white woman and then was killed for it. Had these teens been white and on the
side of the park that doesn't edge close to Harlem ,
then it's likely they would have never been questioned. Five rightfully implicates the police and the public for its
unjustified bloodlust for the teens, but also the media, who sensationalized
the story without asking the bigger questions. Then there's Donald Trump, a
blowhard even back then, who took out a full-page ad calling for the return of
the death penalty just for this case.
The movie is mostly told by the Five — Antron McCray, Kevin
Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise — as they narrate that
chapter of their life. They were found guilty in a 1990 trial and spent 12
years in prison until DNA evidence exonerated them. Prison seems to have
hardened them, though they seem wiser and also contemplative and sad. They felt
that their city had betrayed them, which is a correct assumption. It struck me
that they never appeared angry. Just calm and quiet.
The film neglects one of the central figures: the jogger, later
identified as Trisha Meili. She survived the attack, though her recovery was
agonizingly slow. It's understandable that she not want to participate in the
movie featuring the men she associated with her attack (she has no memory of
the rape itself), but the film should have placed more emphasis on her story,
especially since she's made it more public with her book I Am the Central Park Jogger.
The film is made by documentarian Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah
Burns and David McMahon. It's less static and rigid than many of Burns' other
documentaries (Baseball and The Civil War), and its use of footage
is exact and well-researched. I liked some of the little details, like how
Raymond Santana says his arrest and conviction made front-page headlines, but
his exoneration barely made the paper.
Too many of these stories are happening: police are so sure of a
suspect that they overlook evidence to support their false hopes. I saw it in
all three Paradise Lost movies, about
the West Memphis Three and their eventual exoneration, and also with Errol
Morris' The Thin Blue Line, in which
Randall Adams is wrongly convicted because he just seemed guilty. Police have a
responsibility to get these facts right, but in all three cases, police
answered one bad hunch with a worse one. And when they were called on it they
doubled down on wrong assumptions, false hope and tampered confessions.
Police need to be held to a high standard, not just for the
Trisha Meilis of the world, but also the Antron McCrays. The Kevin Richardsons.
The Raymond Santanas. The Yusef Salaams. And the Korey Wises.
