Documentary Review: 'The Central Park Five: A Film by Ken Burns & David McMahon & Sarah Burns'

On November 23, 2012, the 300 member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired The Central Park Five: A Film by Ken Burns & David McMahon & Sarah Burns, a two-hour-long documentary about the five teenaged black and Latino boys who were arrested and coerced into "confessions" by overzealous New York City detectives and prosecutors in the infamous 1989 "Central Park jogger case." Co-written and directed by documentarian Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah, and producer/director David McMahon, The Central Park Five is a searing and often infuriating case study of racial prejudice, sloppy police work, wrongful prosecution, and the role of mass media in perpetuating a miscarriage of justice.

The film, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival several months before it aired on PBS, tells the story of the long ordeal experienced by New York City teens Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kevin Wise, and Yusuf Salaam after a passerby discovers "the body of a woman barely clinging to life" in a secluded area of Manhattan's Central Park. Within days, the five teens are arrested, interrogated for hours, and ultimately charged with the rape and attempted murder of Tricia Meili, a 29-year-old bank employee identified in the media simply as "The Central Park Jogger."

At the time of the attack, New York City was experiencing an uptick in crime as well as increasing tensions between white residents and the black/Latino community. Democratic Mayor Ed Koch and local law enforcement leaders. including Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, sex crimes division ADA Linda Fairstein, Rudy Guiliani, and ADA Elizabeth Lederer, were under extreme pressure from the press and the public to crack down on crime.

The attack on Ms. Meili was carried out by serial rapist/murderer Matias Reyes, but it coincided with a rash of assaults and harassments in Central Park perpetrated by gangs of young teens. These random acts were labeled by TV and print media reporters by a term which entered the American vernacular in 1989: wilding. And because on the night in question there had been at least two such incidents that coincided with Reyes' attack on Ms. Meili, the detectives assigned to the case quickly came to the conclusion that a gang of young teens had done the deed.

Eager - too much so - to make arrests in the "Central Park jogger" case, the District Attorney and the New York Police Department arrested McCray (the only one of the five men who does not appear on screen), Richardson, Santana, Wise, and Salaam, mercilessly interrogate them for hours, and eventually force them to make false confessions. Later, when they are put on trial, jurors will convict all five based on those tainted confessions, unwittingly adding another layer of complexity in an instance of a miscarriage of justice.

Eventually, the truth about who really raped and nearly killed the Central Park jogger - who survived and made a speedy recovery from her injuries - emerged, and the Central Park Five were exonerated by the state of New York. But the damage was done; five innocent men went to prison for several years, freed only because the real criminal confessed to the crime after being arrested and convicted for the murder of another New York City woman.

© 2012 Florentine Films, WETA-TV, and PBS

My Take

Jim Dwyer - New York Times: Whatever you do in life, you make mistakes, and you either face your mistakes, or you don't. I don't think the press faced its mistakes. I don't think the Police Department faced the truth in what had happened, because the truth of what had happened is almost unbearable. By prosecuting the wrong people in the central park rape case, Matias Reyes continued to hurt, maim and kill. And they could have had him, but they got stuck with a mistake, and they are still invested in that mistake.

The Central Park Five is an atypical film for Ken Burns and his production company Florentine Films. Although it delves into themes that documentaries like The Civil War, The West, Baseball, and even The War explore (race relations in America, social changes in American culture, and historical forces that shape events), practically none of the usual "Ken Burns films" techniques are used in this absorbing if somewhat upsetting look at a case in which lazy media coverage, bad police work, and racial tensions in late 1980s New York City robbed five teens of their freedom and eventually cost the State of New York $41 million, the cost of a settlement paid to the eponymous Central Park Five after a judge vacated their convictions in 2002 after Reyes - dubbed in '89 as the East Side Rapist - belatedly confessed.

Instead of Burns' distinctive use of pans-over-still photos, poignant music by David Cieri and Jacqueline Schwab, or a narrator like Keith David or Peter Coyote, The Central Park Five uses a mix of archival news footage, clippings from newspapers of the time (including then-real estate mogul Donald Trump's full-page ad demanding that New York should reinstate the death penalty to execute "animals" like the accused youths), and "present-day" interviews with former Mayor Ed Koch, New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer, David Dinkins (another ex-mayor of the Big Apple), and all of the wrongfully-convicted Central Park Five (Anton McCray is heard but not seen; the other four men agreed to appear on camera), their relatives, legal experts involved in the case, and historians who weigh in about the crime, the various socio-cultural factors that shaped it, and its consequences.

Tellingly, the police investigators and prosecutors who participated in the Central Park jogger case refused to be interviewed by Burns and his staff. It is hard to say why; either they are too invested in their pet theories that the Central Park Five did something criminal regardless of Reyes' late confession, or they are too embarrassed that they made a big mistake by coercing confessions from five scared and tired teens who said what the cops wanted to hear so they could go home.

The Central Park Five doesn't shy away from its premise, which is summarized by the late Roger Ebert's review:

In New York, the image of violent young blacks was frightening, and in West Memphis, Ark., there was the scarcely less terrifying allegation that the defendants were members of a "satanic cult." Both prosecutions were based on confessions. Both convictions were overturned after others confessed and matched DNA evidence. Race was not the only factor; non-whites in New York were as horrified as whites at the violent and lawless behavior of the assailants.

Our justice system presumes defendants are innocent until proven guilty. It also places extreme pressure on the police to make arrests leading to convictions — to "solve" the crimes. The police officers knew, or should have known, that the confessions involved were extracted by psychological force (the Arkansas case was obtained from a young boy who was mentally retarded). If a heinous crime ends with a popular conviction, the system is satisfied. Nobody wants to hear contradictory evidence.

Even though The Central Park Five makes its case eloquently and honestly, it''s not a flawless film. Per New York Times critic Manohla Dargis:

[The} movie would be a lot stronger if it included everything that was in play back in 1989. Because the one thing that it fails to do persuasively is explain why so many people in New York, including African-Americans and professional skeptics writing in left-leaning publications like The Village Voice, almost immediately accepted that the teenagers were guilty and believed the police, with whom these same skeptics had often been often politically at odds. As the filmmakers accurately depict, the teenagers were soon demonized and dehumanized, accused of being members of a “wolf pack” that went “wilding” like animals. To judge from the documentary you might think that it was mostly the agenda-driven tabloids that lobbed these descriptions.

Yet, in a special section on the April assault that was published by The Voice a few weeks later, one of the best articles, by Wayne Barrett, included the word “pack” in a headline. But Mr. Barrett emphasized what the police had or had not done the night of April 19, not what the teenagers might have done. In that same issue The Voice printed an investigation by Barry Michael Cooper that quoted residents of a housing complex across from Schomburg Plaza who identified several of the accused teenagers as belonging to a group of sometimes violent neighborhood troublemakers. Some of the accusations involved the usual kid stuff, like making noise, but there were also brutal attacks. A lengthy New York magazine cover article several months later also detailed violence.

Maybe the filmmakers thought that this history might muddy the waters and cast suspicion on the teenagers all over again. The problem is that by ignoring it — as well as gliding rather too fast over the gang attacks on the other people in Central Park on April 19 — it seems as if there were something here that needs to be hidden. 

Still, warts and all, The Central Park Five (which was inspired by Sarah Burns' college thesis on racism and the media coverage of the case) is a powerful if uncharacteristically brief (159-minute) documentary from America's current master documentarian. It exposes the myth that America is a "post-racial" society, and it is a vivid indictment of our criminal justice system and the press that covers lurid crimes such as the Central Park jogger case.

Sources:

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: Filmmakers Still Seek Lessons From a Case That Rocked a City The Documentary ‘The Central Park Five’

Roger Ebert: The Central Park Five (Review)