London Film Festival review - The Central Park Five

This documentary looks at a high-profile crime and the less high-profile miscarriage of justice that went with it, showing how difficult it is to get justice when the public are baying for your blood.

In 1989 a young woman was raped and brutally beaten while out jogging in Central Park. At the same time in a different part of the park, a large group of teenage boys from Harlem were causing trouble. When the jogger was found barely alive, the police started interrogating the boys they had in custody, using the classic “good cop/bad cop” technique and telling each one that their friends had already dobbed them in. Using 14-, 15- and 16-year-old logic, five made statements that they saw the others rape the woman.

The Central Park jogger case was the last straw for embattled New Yorkers. Their city was a mess, ravaged by a crack-induced crime wave. Mayor Edward Koch called it “the crime of the century” (quite a claim for a town which a decade earlier had been terrorised by the Son of Sam, but there you go) and said that prosecuting these boys would be a test of the criminal justice system. The trouble was, the boys had nothing to do with it. Their statements didn’t add up, they didn’t know details of the crime, their DNA didn’t match, and the timeline didn’t make any sense. They had never been in trouble before. These small issues didn’t seem to matter to the police or the prosecutors. Or the jury.

The Central Park Five is a very angry film, showing the indifference, cruelty, racism and just plain stupidity of the system. The boys, now men, speak eloquently about what happened (after watching this and West of Memphis, I swear going to prison for a crime you didn’t commit makes you really clever and poetic). Directors Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s unfussy approach uses archive footage really well, painting a picture of a New York very different from the city seen today. Hopefully this means that mistakes like this are less likely now, but you just can’t be sure. If the press gets whipped up into a frenzy, the truth can still just go out the window.