The City of New York has reportedly reached a $40 million settlement with the five men who were wrongly convicted of raping a female jogger in Central Park 25 years ago. Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam were arrested in 1989 for beating and raping a white woman in New York City’s Central Park. She came to be known as the Central Park jogger. The five boys were all black and Latinos between the ages of 14 and 16. Their arrest made national headlines. They initially confessed, but soon they recanted, insisting they had admitted to the crime under the duress of exhaustion and coercion from police officers.
Natalie Byfield talking:
The media played a variety of roles, actually, in it. It occurred in the context of the language that was used. And this is the part that was discussed quite a bit. We remember very well terms like “wilding,” terms like “savage,” and this case was in fact the case that was used to invent this concept of wilding. We hadn’t—it hadn’t appeared in our lexicon, certainly not in journalism, before this case. So, this helped to inflame public passions, certainly, the type of language that was used.
In addition to the language that was used, the media just simply failed to interrogate the police. It failed to act as an independent body in the context of the case. So it acted as a mouthpiece for the police department, in essence. So, when the police or the district attorney presented evidence about hairs that matched or were consistent with the hairs of the jogger, and then the evidence sort of appeared and disappeared, there was no interrogation. There were no stories following up on this. When there were reports of a knife being used, and then suddenly the district attorney’s office or the police are not saying anything else about a knife anymore, the things that appeared and disappeared were not interrogated at all.
the hand-in-glove relationship between the police department and the media, it’s interesting—we were talking earlier—that one of the key detectives in this case, a guy by the name of Mike Sheehan, who later became one of the big sources for the reporters, ended up leaving the police department and becoming a television reporter.
it’s a really interesting institutional relationship between the police and the press, particularly the newspapers that cover crime and rely on crime stories—and I should say street crime stories—to sort of be part of the fodder of what they regularly report to the public. They need them. We know, working as journalists, that we need them. Part of the practice of working journalists is to work out of police headquarters and develop close relationships with the police. And the problem is when that relationship becomes too close or when you don’t recognize that you’re not part—you’re not part of that team that is policing the world in that way, you don’t belong to that one group. You’re in fact, supposedly, the fourth estate, independent from all these groups, and the overseer, really, and an important element in democracy. So when you forfeit your role to do this, then all sorts of things will happen.
In 2002, the convicted rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, confessed in jail that he had committed the rape of the Central Park jogger and he had acted alone. DNA evidence later confirmed his participation in the crime, showed he alone was linked to the semen found in and on the victim.
MATIAS REYES: I showed them the top of the entrance, the direction she came by. I showed them where she made the turn. I showed them where I picked up a tree branch and down the road where I struck her over the head with the tree branch and where I dragged her in. She just kept moaning, you know, saying, “Stop,” and grabbing her head, you know, because she was in pain and all that, you know? She was bleeding. I can’t explain to you what happened after I left there, that park, that night, but I can guarantee you that there was no way these kids saw this woman come in or have a idea of where she was coming from. I’m the one that did this.
That is the convicted rapist and murderer, who admitted this in jail. He went to—he bumped into one of the Central Park jogger defendants who was in jail and said, “I’m sorry.” And this is how this whole thing unfolded. Now, what’s astounding about the story with Matias Reyes is that he had the MO. He had done this over and over to women; he was a rapist, and he was a murderer. But because the police were blinded by, well, their prejudice around these five young men, he was not investigated. In fact, his case, the reason he went to jail, he raped a woman in my building. And in that case, when he ran out, the doorman jumped him as the woman ran out screaming, and that’s how he ultimately was caught. But so many women would have been saved. if they had—they never connected the semen to these young men.
in fact, there was a rape in Central Park two days before the jogger was raped, and something like 200 yards from the site of the jogger’s attack. So it does seem odd that if you have a pattern of rapes in a particular area, that you don’t examine the possibility that this could have been done by the same person. But they were so wedded to the idea that this group of teens had done it. And it—I have analyzed this to just—to the point where I’ve just concluded that they believed that there was some sort of moral panic going on in our society around the issue of drugs. And we saw the regular nightly news reports, particularly local news reports, across the entire country, where every night they would walk out black and—young black and Latino men and put them—the perp would walk into the car.
This was at the height of the crack epidemic.
they were the go-to people for all crime. They were—they were equated with crime. So the idea that we have a culture of rape in this country, the idea that there was a problem of rape, didn’t really, for me, really penetrate the investigation in the way it should have, because then they would have investigated other possibilities. But for them, they had latched onto this wilding and this really racialized understanding of what was going on. And I think, in terms of even the newsroom and what got in the way of the investigation were also these racial attitudes and the willingness of the press to buy into these racial attitudes.
— source democracynow.org
Natalie Byfield, reporter for the New York Daily News at the time of Central Park Five case. She is now an associate professor of sociology at St. John’s University in Queens. Her new book is called Savage Portrayals: Race, Media and the Central Park Jogger Story.