When They See Us

In the When They See Us American drama miniseries, a jogger named Trisha Meili was assaulted and raped in New York’s Central Park in 1989. Five young boys (known as the Central Park Five): Kevin Richardson, Anton Mcray, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise; were charged with the crime. The series displays how the Central Park Five maintained their innocence and spent years fighting the convictions hoping to be exonerated. The story spans a quarter of a century from when the teens were first questioned about the incident in the spring of 1989, going through their exoneration in 2002 and ultimately the settlement reached with the city of New York in 2014. The District Attorney labeled the five as “animals” and saw them as suspects before it was even confirmed that they had anything to do with the case. There was a media firestorm in which front pages of newspapers depicted the five as “bloodthirsty”, “savages”, and “human mutations”. This highlighted racial tensions in NYC and played into the preconceived notions about African-American youth. One concept that we explored this semester and can be applied to this case is the Critical Race Theory. It was easier for the city to accept that the five did this because there was a stereotype regarding minorities that were black and latino being more violent. The NYPD supported this by trying to justify that the five were “Thugs”.


During the questioning, the boys were told that if they cooperated, then the police would let them go. Promises for cooperation are considered illegal but the NYPD persisted to investigate these despite not knowing the facts. The actual perpetrator of the crime was being investigated by the same NYPD detective that was on this case. Somehow-they were too blinded by the grandiose press upon this case that they could not connect the dots and see that all the physical damage done to the victim matched with the actual perpetrator’s tendencies. Let’s take a step back though. The NYPD detectives were pressured by the New York County District Attorney to “get the perpetrator”. Conveniently there were people who seemed to be near the scene of the crime-the Central Park Five. The District Attorney was being pressured by the city to catch a perpetrator. When this type of case happens and there are convenient person(s) to blame, our society puts a spotlight on the people in the justice system to find the actual perpetrator guilty. When no one is found guilty, the people in the justice system are seen as incompetent. When one is a District Attorney, they are desperate to avoid being called incompetent-as this may cost them their job.When people are under pressure, it is often that they will get caught in tunnel vision and would not be able to perform with a sense of perspective. In this case, we saw how the DA ignored the plain facts and coerced the five into admitting guilt. Ignoring the plain facts is a form of lying. There is another form of lying that appears in this documentary: deflecting. The prosecution had a weak offense because they had no physical evidence or eyewitnesses. They found hair, but the hair analysis was notoriously unreliable. There were inconsistencies in their stories as well. There wasn’t even DNA evidence. When the cop was interviewed by a different prosecutor towards the end of the documentary, they were convinced they did the job and got the right person so they were resistant to new information being presented. Their reputation and career was at stake. Again, this is another form of lying: delusion. We looked at all of these forms of lying earlier in the semester in Stephanie Ericsson’s essay, The Ways We Lie. Stephanie Ericsson asserts that we “must consider the meaning of our actions” when deciding whether or not we have lied. In this case, the prosecutors, detectives, and DA lied because they were desperate. They had something to lose if they didn’t lie: their reputation and their career. I can understand how it would be hard to maintain perspective if a whole city depended on you to serve justice, and it would be easy to make a mistake. However, this is no excuse. I think it comes around full circle to this idea: it only takes one person not doing their job to the best of their ability to mess up the justice system. There is a moral and ethical wrong in police placing heavy burdens upon individuals that are innocent to admit that they are guilty just because they want to find someone to blame.