Central Park Five Documentary Analysis Essay

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The 2012 Ken Burns documentary entitled The Central Park Five offers disturbing insight into institutionalized racism and the criminal justice system. Co-produced by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, The Central Park Five is about five children of color—teenagers—who were wrongfully convicted of multiple charges including sexual assault. In addition to illuminating the way the media can feed into racial stereotypes about criminality, the documentary also shows how law enforcement uses unethical tactics of interrogation to secure a conviction at all costs. Pressures to arrest and convict are shared among all members of the law enforcement team, even though individual officers will claim that they were following orders. Therefore, The Central Park Five is also instructive for the way it shows how police organizational culture needs to change. The practices and tactics used by New York police undermine the constitutional rights of citizens to due process.

Essentially, the five teenagers referred to in the film’s title were treated as if they were guilty and were manipulated and coerced into a false confession. As Drizin & Leo (2004) point out, false confessions elicited in cases like the Central Park Five are a matter of procedural injustice. Thankfully, DNA evidence now exists to exonerate the five young men and scores of innocent people like them. Yet the police interrogation techniques used on the Central Park Five planted suggestions into the minds of the suspects, causing them to “internalize guilt” and “confabulate details in memory consistent with that belief,” (Kassin & Kiechel, 1996, p. 125). Using actual audio from the confession, Burns shows how incrdibly detailed false confessions can be. The film shows how the police badgered the boys to such a degree that they came to believe that they had in fact committed the crime, which is what led to the false confession.

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The fact that the boys were still teenagers is also important because juveniles are far more susceptible to police pressure and are, as the film shows, vulnerable to false confessions (Drake, Gonzalez, Sigurdsson, et al., 2017). Were it not for the DNA evidence and the actual perpetrator miraculously having leaked his confession to the crime to a fellow inmate, the five boys would still be in prison. Wrongful convictions are a miscarriage of justice. To reduce instances of wrongful convictions, it is critical that police improve their interrogation techniques even if it means slowing down an investigation.

In addition to the issues surrounding police interrogations, adolescent vulnerability, and false confessions, The Central Park Five also directly addresses the issue of racial bias and media coverage. As Duru (2004) points out, the Central Park Five is one of a litany of cases that was based around the “myth of the bestial black man,” (p. 1315). The filmmakers show how the five boys were portrayed in the media as “wildling” and “wolf pack,” essentially providing the American public with propaganda that played right into the prosecution’s hands. Even if jurors could be truly neutral, which they can never be,….....

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