David Rascoe
Art of Rhetoric
2/6/2020
This week’s blog post will revolve around this week’s class viewing of the Central Park 5 documentary film. In this week’s viewing we were re-introduced to the kids being interrogated by police. In the film, it is noted that the kids were held at the precinct for interrogation for 14-30 hours. Although I find this disgusting, it is almost expected behavior of police in New York City at that time. It was a culmination of so much beforehand that of course young black people were going to be brought in as suspects, but this time they weren’t young black men, they were young black boys/children (and one puerto rican boy).
I appreciated how in depth Sarah Burns about the situation by revolving the context of the situation with the perspective at the time of the police department, the city, news journalists, celebrities, and even the mayor. There were so many examples of racist and dehumanizing framing regarding “the suspects”, the 14-16 year old boys calling them a wolf pack and including in the boys charges against them, rioting. How can 5 boys incite a riot? It is sad that even the mayor noticed a sad point about the pristineness of Central Park. he says that if it would have happened anywhere other than Central Park, it would have been bad, but not that bad. Central Park was seen as a sanctuary that not even criminals dared to venture into and commit nefarious acts, but this was changed with the Central Park 5 case.
People were looking to point fingers, even discussions surrounding the death penalty were brought back into everyday discussion purely because of the commotion this case caused. I simply found it disgusting how these boys were treated from the beginning to where we are now in the film. The boys are told to tell fabricated stories, which we saw in the film, none of the boy’s stories matched so I don’t know how they were all still in trouble. Secondly, to hold teenage boys for up to, if not more than an entire day, questioning them with no food, very little drink, what did they think was going to happen? The boys were scared and they thought that was their way out so they took it. It was a shameful display of interrogating and policing in general. Then, when they did the video interrogations after they were forced to fabricate a story, for a lot of the boys they had their original precinct interrogator in the room with them, adding pressure on the boy to retell the fabricated story. This was an utterly sickening display of policing, torture against innocent children, and NYC’s humanity at the time (or lack thereof).
In conclusion, there were so many holes in the case regarding the boys that I don’t know how the police department, or anyone weren’t more critical of these boys being the perpetrators. I think it goes to show how quickly American society is ready to cast black and hispanic people out and consider them criminals with no real evidence and with the fact in mind that they were less than 17 years old. It is saddening, but frankly, expected.
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