The Central Park Five and Racist Capitalist Injustice

For black and Latino youth in New York City, the walk home from school, an errand run to a corner grocery or even standing in front of one’s own residence carries the risk of being stopped, shoved up against a wall and interrogated by the cops. Some are then thrown into the “system”—arrested, handcuffed, either coerced into pleading guilty or standing trial in the rigged “justice” of the racist capitalist courts, only to emerge from prison years later, with no hope of a job, public housing or any other social service necessary for survival. A sudden movement, word of protest or facial expression not to the cops’ liking can be a death sentence on the spot. Although most are able to walk away, it is just a rain check until the next humiliating encounter.

This scene played out nearly 700,000 times last year under the ruthless “stop and frisk” operations of NYC mayor Bloomberg and his top cop Raymond Kelly. So widespread are the NYPD’s brutality and violations of civil rights, the cops cost the city some $100 million in lawsuits during fiscal year 2011. Such claims jumped by over 20 percent last year. The most prominent case pending is a $250 million federal civil rights lawsuit filed ten years ago by the “Central Park Five”—Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Kevin Richardson. In 1989, at the ages of 14 to 16, they were falsely charged, convicted and condemned to sentences ranging from seven to 13 years for the brutal assault and rape of a 28-year-old bank executive out for a nighttime run in Central Park. With the 2002 confession of the actual rapist, Matias Reyes, which was confirmed by DNA, the Central Park Five were finally exonerated after serving their entire sentences.

The recent documentary, The Central Park Five, by Sarah Burns, her husband David McMahon and father Ken Burns, powerfully exposes how the cops and prosecutors—and bourgeois journalists who joined the racist pack howling for blood—had every reason to know that the five teenagers had nothing to do with the jogger’s rape. The film demonstrates how the racist show trial devastated their lives and those of their families. Raymond Santana noted that he was “at that point of coming into who I was...but I never really got there.” They were repeatedly denied parole for refusing to admit to the rape.

Sometime after 9 p.m. on 19 April 1989, Trisha Meili went for her regular run around the reservoir in Central Park. A little earlier, a group of some 30 black and Latino teenagers from Harlem, the Five among them, had entered the north end of the park. In the course of less than an hour, some of the group attacked joggers and bicycle riders. An apparently homeless man was brutally beaten. Some of the youths were picked up and initially held for questioning regarding the assaults. At no time did they cross paths with Meili. When her horribly beaten body was discovered in another part of the park, the calculus of the NYPD cops was simple: black youths, white rape victim, crime solved.

The documentary shows how the cops and prosecutors knew very well there was no DNA or other evidence to link the Five to the rape. Since DNA testing turned up only one semen sample, the cops knew it was not a “gang rape,” as they luridly described it. The documentary’s footage of the crime scene showing the narrow path of worn grass where Reyes had dragged the jogger’s body clearly ruled out more than one attacker. Although the victim lost 75 percent of her blood, there was none found on any of the youths. Cops also concealed from the defense that a similar rape had occurred two days earlier in the park, for which Reyes was later convicted.

The heart of the prosecution’s case was coerced “confessions” extracted through threats, false promises of leniency and assurances that they could go home once ratting the others out. Even in the confessions, obtained through up to 30 hours of interrogations, not one of them ever admitted to actually raping the jogger. Instead, they told of being part of a group attack in which others committed the rape. As graphically captured by the documentary, in the basic details as to the location, description of the woman, number of people involved and weapons used, the stories were so disparate from each other—and the known facts—as to demonstrate that they were nothing but the product of scared, tired and hungry kids trying to tell the cops what they wanted to hear so they could go home.

To cover for the NYPD’s crimes, the Bloomberg administration has launched a vendetta against the filmmakers. Lawyers for the City have issued subpoenas demanding they turn over all unused footage of their interviews with the five men. The filmmakers have refused to cave in, citing New York State shield laws protecting journalists from compromising their sources. When the City ranted that the shield law was inapplicable as the documentary wasn’t journalism but “advocacy,” Ken Burns tartly replied: “We made a film about the facts of the case and that is these men were wrongly convicted, and had years of their lives stolen.” He poignantly added, “One of the things that was stolen from these men was their humanity. In the media they were turned into wild beasts, a wolf pack, and we wanted to return their humanity.”

A Toxic Cocktail

For years before 1989, New York had been synonymous with urban decay, graphically shown by the smoldering ashes of South Bronx tenements, graffiti-covered subway cars, litter-ridden streets, citywide electrical blackouts, crumbling bridges and, above all, record levels of crime. While the Park Avenue bourgeoisie glided above the fray, shuttling from Wall Street to Lincoln Center to cocktails at the Waldorf and back to fundraisers at the Met, working people and the ghetto poor were reeling. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in manufacturing, longshore, printing, garment, food and beverage production had been lost since the 1960s. Successive city administrations had taken the ax to just about every beneficial social program or municipal service—libraries, medical clinics, after-school programs, firehouses. Free tuition at the celebrated city university system was eliminated, ushering in a racist purge of the colleges.

The stock market boom of the 1980s brought a vast expansion of jobs in financial and corporate services—bankers, accountants, lawyers, advertising and insurance—as well as low-wage jobs to service them. In contrast to an earlier generation of financial barons who lived in Connecticut and Long Island, the new wave of Wall Street bankers and yuppies were staying put. Emptied factories were converted into million-dollar lofts, and high-rise luxury buildings sprang up across Manhattan. Toney new restaurants, discos and exclusive health clubs became the playgrounds for the new rich. Stretch limos, in which Wall Street traders could sip champagne and snort cocaine, careened past poor black kids being busted for smoking a pipe of crack on streets filled with thousands upon thousands of homeless. Discontent seethed—and was kept in check by racist cop terror and the pitting of one sector of the working population against another.

Ed Koch, a voice of white petty-bourgeois rage against blacks and labor (see box), had run NYC for 12 years at the time Meili’s unconscious body was discovered. The Koch years laid a trail of horrors, beginning with the many black people killed by the cops—among them 67-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs, 25-year-old artist Michael Stewart and 17-year-old black honor student Edmund Perry. In 1987 alone, the killer cops gunned down 24 people, all but three black or Hispanic. Lynch mobs took the lives of transit worker Willie Turks in Gravesend, Brooklyn, in 1982 and 23-year-old Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens, in 1986.

These atrocities were repeatedly met by outrage and protest. Positioning themselves at the head of the anger were the demagogic nationalist preachers Herbert Daughtry and, most prominently, Al Sharpton, who in the mid 1980s wore a wire for the Feds investigating maverick black elected officials. Sharpton and Daughtry played a critical role in redirecting the rage against cop and other racist terror into intercommunal hostilities.

The case of the Central Park jogger was like lighter fluid added to the racist fear and hatred toward the besieged black population. From the moment the victim was taken to the hospital, all black and Latino youth, not just the Five, were being demonized in the press. The New York Times (21 April 1989) ran the headline, “Youths Rape and Beat Central Park Jogger,” while the right-wing gutter rag New York Post screamed: “Wolfpack Rapes Jogger.” The press dutifully ran with the cops’ claim that the detained youths boasted that their rampage through the park was a new form of ghetto amusement known as “wilding.” Four months later, a gang of white punks in Bensonhurst blew away 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins, who was in “their” neighborhood to visit his white girlfriend. The neighbors excused this coldblooded murder by pointing to the Central Park rape.

It also quickly became a clarion call for racist legal lynching. A New York Post (26 April 1989) editorial demanded, “Channel Your Outrage: Demand the Death Penalty.” Donald Trump paid $85,000 for full-page ads in the city’s four major newspapers declaring: “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police.” Trump demanded, “Let our politicians give back our police department’s power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of ‘police brutality’ which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save another’s.” Our article “Stop Legal Lynching!” (WV No. 477, 12 May 1989) denounced the racist lynch-mob atmosphere surrounding the case; however, it also wrongly took as good coin the news accounts that the “attackers were the hard core of a larger bunch of marauders” who had been in the park that night.

In 1994, George Pataki’s support of the death penalty played a large role in his election victory over the incumbent, Democratic governor Mario Cuomo, who had repeatedly vetoed death penalty legislation. The next year, the New York legislature voted to bring back capital punishment, which was later ruled unconstitutional by the Court of Appeals in 2004.

Amid a tightly contested mayoral primary race with black Democrat David Dinkins, Koch seized on the jogger case to once again play to the racist vote. Deemed better able to keep a lid on the NYC tinderbox, Dinkins was elected mayor in 1989 after reassuring Wall Street that the unions and minorities “will take it from me.” He did his best to live up to that promise, but was nonetheless dropped by the city rulers as too beholden to the black population. Dinkins lost the 1993 election to Rudolph Giuliani, whose campaign whipped up a racist riot of 10,000 cops who stormed City Hall denouncing the mayor as a “washroom attendant” and “crack addict.” Dinkins’ enduring legacy for the city was his appointment of Ray Kelly as police commissioner.

“Putting the Criminal Justice System on Trial”

The documentary opens with a statement from Koch made shortly after the Five’s arrest: “I think that everybody here—maybe across the nation—will look at this case to see how the criminal justice system works.... This is, I think, putting the criminal justice system on trial.” From their liberal perspective, the filmmakers consider Koch’s statement to be ironic—the wrong men were convicted, so the system failed its “trial.” A similar take comes from the Workers World Party, which describes the frame-ups of the Central Park Five and the Scottsboro Boys—nine black youths falsely accused of raping two white women in the 1930s—as “powerful reminders of what can happen when the justice system is manipulated, the truth is ignored, and racism dominates” (www.workers.org, 14 December 2012).

In fact, racist frame-ups are not “what can happen” but endemic to the very workings of American capitalist justice. The cops, prosecutors and courts are core components of the capitalist state, whose function is to repress workers and oppressed minorities in defending the class rule, profits and property of the capitalist class. The oppression of black people is integral to American capitalism, serving to divide the working class and drive down wages for all. The institutions of the state cannot be anything but racist to the core.

Indeed, for the capitalist rulers, the justice system passed Koch’s trial with flying colors: it did exactly what it is meant to do. The Central Park case ended in conviction and played a major role in feeding a climate in which ghetto youth are demonized as inveterate criminals, who can only be safely housed in prisons. This war on black people was replicated in cities across the country, as ghetto residents, once a reservoir of unskilled labor for auto and steel plants that had since been shuttered, became a “surplus” population in the eyes of America’s capitalist rulers.

The “war on drugs,” launched by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, took aim at black people with a brutal vengeance. Reagan’s foot soldiers were Jesse Jackson and other black Democrats. In New York City, Sharpton joined the cops on the street in whipping up a pogrom against Arab shopkeepers supposedly selling “drug paraphernalia.” The anti-drug crusade brought draconian mandatory minimum and “three strikes” sentencing laws, expanded use of the death penalty and a deep erosion of the rights of those accused of crimes. Over the last four decades, the prison population has more than quadrupled to over two million, the majority black and Latino.

Today, billionaire mayor Bloomberg acts as if the city is just a playground for himself and his Wall Street cronies. The working people who create the wealth in this society are looked down upon as mere vassals. Although less overtly racist than Koch and Giuliani, Bloomberg has heaped on the cruelties of life for the black and Latino masses to an extent that his predecessors could envy. The NYPD’s “stop and frisk” offensive has led to tens of thousands being saddled with records, many for simply possessing small amounts of marijuana. More than half of black city residents old enough to work had no job at all last year, and the number of homeless children, disproportionately black, is at a level not witnessed in NYC since the Great Depression.

Society’s masters expect that the case of the Central Park Five will end up being little more than a footnote, something for them to shrug off as the cost of getting caught doing their business. At the time the Five were exonerated, we wrote in “NYC: Racist Frame-Up of Black, Latino Youth,” (WV No. 790, 1 November 2002): “No amount of money can mend what has been done to their young lives, or to their families. But we welcome any money the five can wrench out of the racist city fathers—selling off Trump Plaza and giving them the proceeds would be a start.” Even if it were to come to pass, such a minimal measure for the Five would do absolutely nothing to alter the daily dehumanization of black people in New York and other cities across the country. True justice for McCray, Santana, Wise, Richardson, Salaam as well as the millions of black youth who walk in their shoes will come only when the multiracial proletariat rises up to smash this capitalist system and establish a workers government.