The Central Park Jogger Documentary Report

Yeah, it's snowing. . . .I called in sick today because I had a bad sinus headache. The left side of my head hurts! For once, I'm glad I have a massive sinus headache!

Anyway, I watched Katie Couric's special report on the Central Park jogger who was beaten and raped back in 1989. She has been revealed to be Trisha Meili, New Jersey native who became an investment banker. Ms. Meili's story is certainly inspiring, especially in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, because of how she refuses to live in fear and continues to enjoy life in spite of everything that's happened to her. (It definitely wasn't a good idea, though, for her to go jogging in the park at night, especially north of 96th Street, where the attack occurred.)

The story, though, continues to be a flashpoint for the issues of race and justice in New York City. Five black and Hispanic teenagers were utlimately charged and convicted for the crime, even though it became clear later on that their confessions to police were coerced. The detectives from the New York Police Department, easily one of the most racist police departments in the nation (though the Philadelphia police, to be honest, make the NYPD look like the Mayberry sheriff's office), continue to defend their work, and the five suspects were found innocent and released from prison only after a convicted killer, linked to crime by DNA, confessed to perpetrating the crime on his own. The very fact that five innocent teenagers, on the basis of racial and ethnic prejudice and their inabiity to get a decent defense, wasted a dozen years of their lives. The black and Latino communities are ticked off royally over the whole thing, and understandably so; these teenagers were apprehended for a couple of minor offenses and charged with a crime they didn't commit, and there was little or nothing that could be done about it.

There's more. Back in 1989, there was outrage in the minority communities over the exposure the local news media gave the boys, including their identities, while Ms. Meili's identity was kept a secret, as well it should have been given the nature of the horrendous crime committed against her person. The Amsterdam News, a black New York paper, failed to see how it was right for the white victim to be given her privacy and not have the same courtesy given to the five susppects who were supposed to be innocent until proven guilty . . . and thus identified Ms. Meili by name. The unfair treatment given to the suspects, of course, doesn't justify the Amsterdam News's editorial practices. And there was hypocrisy on the other side; Donald Trump, upon hearing of the crime, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times demanding the return of the death penalty in New York state (that occurred in 1995). Later in August 1989, though, when black teenager Yusuf Hawkins was shot dead by white boys in the Italian-American Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst because he was mistaken for the black boyfriend of a white teenage girl, Trump was eerily silent on the need to bring back the death penalty for juvenile felons. (Hawkins had been in Bensonhurst to look at a used car.)

The Central Park criminal incident has no real winners here. Ms. Meili still has to live with the aftereffects of the attack in some fashion. Justice has not been properly served, race and class have permeated the system and rendered moot the idea of equality under the law, and race relations, while far less volatile today then they were in 1989, haven't exactly turned into a lovefest. But there are still signs of hope. Ms. Meili has made a remarkable recovery. The five young men who went to jail for the crime without having committed it have a good chance of getting compensated for their prison time. And New Yorkers, growing more increasingly diverse, may slowly come around to the fact that fearing each other is not a way to fight despicably violent crimes. The Central Park jogging incident of 1989 caused New Yorkers to turn on each other; the terrorist attacks of 2001, though, caused them to turn to each other.

By the way, one thing I didn't like about Couric's report was the prodcution - the artistic camera shots, the soft music, and the like. The "Today"-show production values turned what should have been a story about Ms. Meili and her courage into a piece about Katie Couric and how she presents stories on victims of crime and their courage.