The Central Park Five

There is a documentary called The Central Park Five (2012), which is about five black teenagers from New York who were falsely accused of raping a young white woman in central park on April 19^th 1989.

The film exposes overt racism, among other forms, from the media in the form of the coverage they collectively gave the young men accused before the trial commenced and during trial, this is highlighted by the fact that there was a rooftop rape around the same time that was largely ignored by the media because both the victim and her attacker were white. The five men accused were part of a 25+ group of young men who set about harassing people and destroying property in central park, the media jumped on the slang term for this riotous act ‘wilding’ and linked the term with the rape and painted a picture of ‘out of control’ ‘savage’ young black men running riot in central New York. The institutional racism of New York’s police department and justice department are both exposed, with the “institutional protectionism” received by the district attorney and the police showcasing this.

The five young men accused Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise were taken into police custody and interrogated, without lawyers or caregivers present, for between 14 to 30 hours, and after being coerced by detectives to give false witness statements faced court and the eventual false imprisonment they each faced.

Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon directed the film, which was inspired by Sarah Burns’ thesis, which is on the racist media coverage the central park five faced.

Eventually the men were acquitted after the person who actually committed the crime confessed after feeling sorry for the young men being falsely imprisoned for up to 13 years. Despite this in 2002 the media were “obstinate about being wrong”. The central park five filed a civil lawsuit in 2003 against the City of New York who refused to settle the lawsuit until 2014 when the five received $41 million, as of December 2014 the five were pursuing an additional $52 million in damages for the false accusations, false imprisonment and robbing of childhood and life.