Revisiting Central Park Five; The Power and Social Implications of Our Inherently Flawed Human Perception

Central Park Five is Ken Burns’ 2012 documentary about the five black juveniles who were convicted of the rape and beating of a white woman in 1989. I show the film in my Interpersonal Communication classes at Community College of Philadelphia, and do so primarily because it is an excellent example of human perception, the foundation of all our communication. I begin this section of the course by doing some class exercises and begin our discussion on the personal level. We talked about the basic process of attending, selecting and interpreting the vast amount of information that makes up our own reality, and we talk about how the majority of the conflict we experience is rooted in simple differences in perception among the people involved in that conflict. The film is intended as a supplement to those discussions, as I believe it is also very important to consider the bigger social impact of human perception, and how our human institutions will always be imperfect because they relay on our imperfect human perception. For example, our justice system, which I believe could be the best in the world, but is obviously flawed and repeatedly fails to provide justice to all citizens equally. But ultimately, I show the film as a very poignant example of how we are influenced by media, and that no matter how moved we may be a single source of information, we must exercise our critical thinking before making assumptions of coming to a final conclusion.

Image source flickr.com

I do not show the film to be political. I’ve been teaching for 30 years and I take my professional integrity and responsibility very seriously. I do not indoctrinate students, and when the purpose of the course is to simply gain insight into aspects of communication that can help anyone become a more competent communicator, we can talk about lots of controversial topics without ever getting into politics. Some people think that creating a context for such discussions is inherently political, but this is imply a sign of how effective some voices have been in creating the current political divide that exists in America. It is much easier to accuse college professors of being liberal if you can convince people that discussing important issues that face the nation is a liberal act. But the truth is that when it comes to many topics, when you encourage a room full of people to speak openly about a controversial topic, the group usually moves to a relatively moderate perspective, as logic tends to have that effect, but such logical dialogue can be an outrage to people on both ends of the spectrum.

Before I go any further, I want to plug an excellent post by @cygon titled Understanding Your Mind Palace. In this post @cygon writes about human perception, and the challenge of allowing ourselves to consider new or contradictory information. This post helped inspire my post here, but I believe is also a good companion to what I am attempting to convey.

Before we watch the film in class, I take some time to talk to my students about the way we perceive documentaries, and I make sure that they understand that documentaries are potentially just as biased as any other medium. Documentary film makers run the gamut from ethical to unethical, from honest to dishonest, but even the director with the very best intentions to produce a fair and balanced film is still human. It is often what is not in a film that reveals its bias, along with what is in the film and how pieces of information are juxtaposed.

Ken Burns received some criticism for neglecting to focus enough on various details of the case, like the fact that the boys in the film were harassing and beating random people in Central Park on the night of the rape and beating of the woman. IMDB has a good range of user comments and there are plenty of well-written comments that identify various things that are not in the film. I encourage my students to read these comments before coming to any final conclusion on the film. In a way, such varying perspectives help us see that the documentary as a medium is imperfect by definition, as it is impossible to include every detail of a particular story while still keeping it under 2 or 3 hours in length. Burns’ recent PBS production The Vietnam War is a good demonstration of what it takes to attempt to include everything, as it is a 16 1/2 hour series with little entertainment quality whatsoever. In contrast, I wouldn’t say the purpose of Central Park Five is to entertain, but it is clearly presented in a way that intends to be engaging and fascinating.

Even with all of my own professional ability and effort to understand the story, it is simply impossible to believe that Ken Burns did not get the essence of the story. There are always many truths that make up the conglomerate with which we are left to ultimately judge, and I have not come across a single critique or perspective that makes me believe a horrible crime was not committed against the five boys who were wrongly convicted of the crime. Regardless of anything they were doing, or had done, and regardless of any crime they may have committed, there is simply no reason whatsoever to believe they raped the woman in Central Park. The film presents many facts that support my belief, but there is really only one that matters, and in that way we don’t need a 2-hour film to know this. There is no DNA evidence linking the boys to the crime, but there is DNA evidence that links another man to the crime. That man was arrested for a series of rapes and murders, and that man openly admitted that he committed the crime. The fact that this did not stop the investigation and attempt to convict the boys in its tracks is where the most important issue in this story resides, at least as far as it relates to my purpose of using the film to teach my students about perception. Perhaps the most serious atrocity related to this case is that the man who admitted to the rape was ultimately released and went on to rape at least one more woman.

It is understandable that police see reality in a certain way based on their raw experience of crime, and based on the natural human tendency to attend to and select information that supports our beliefs or goals. We need police to do their difficult jobs, and we also need more understanding as a society that the job of policing and investigating can only be done by humans, and humans have imperfect perception. I have no reservations stating my respect for law enforcement, as I appreciate anyone willing to serve the public in that capacity. But I also have no problem whatsoever criticizing individual officers or detectives who are incompetent, or our of place due to questionable ethics. Teachers should be admired for their work, but bad teachers need to be called out. Lawyers are not the scum some people try to paint them as, but some deserve the criticism. Every profession has good and bad people, and the criminal justice system is no different. However, in the public sphere, it is apparently an affront to all police to criticize specific examples of bad, or even horrific work.

It is understandable that district attorneys and their teams see reality in a certain way based on the mission of their jobs. DAs should be able to trust the evidence presented to them by the police, and they should be able to use that evidence to make important decisions about when and if to prosecute. Finally, they should be able to prosecute with all the leverage they possess. But these shoulds are based on the importance of the facts being credible, and in no way illegally coerced, manipulated or fabricated. I know its just a tv series, but anyone who has seen a few episodes of Law and Order knows we cannot make the assumption that DAs are always given solid facts. Where I have trouble understanding how DAs perceive reality and act on that perception is when it comes to the very troubling pattern of dismissing contrary evidence when it is presented in the middle of an investigation. This tendency actually seems to be endemic to the office. When Matias Reyes is arrested, his DNA is found to match the crime scene and victim, and he admits to the crime, this should bring a halt to the entire story. It does not because the DA is determined to press forward.

The big question at this point is How could an individual make that decision to keep pressing forward when such damning contrary evidence presents itself? Why is there an entire genre of television shows that focuses on this exact same situation? Is it simply a great example of human perception, and that we literally do not attend to or select information that doesn't fit our existing narrative of the truth? Or is it more heinous than that? Do DAs willfully dismiss such information? If it is the latter, then we have to ask, Why would a DA make such a decision? My guess it is that it has to do with a genuine fear, on the part of the individual and the institution, to admit having made a mistake.

I have so much faith in how we govern ourselves in America, as flawed as it may be. But my faith, and hope for the future, rests in the idea that we might someday come to build up our institutions on a such a solid foundation of credibility that the public will actually perceive them as trustworthy. I work in a community college that serves all of Philadelphia. We are the only open access higher education institution in the city, and so we have many, many students who have been royally screwed by the justice system. And in general, I only meet the people who have survived, whether they were able to avoid incarceration or not, and for whatever reason still trust enough in public institutions to try college as a means of improving their lives. I had a hard time understanding the general mistrust of the justice system among minorities until I began actually meeting people who have experienced it first hand, alone or along with family members, and hearing their stories. My perception was seriously flawed when my life experience was made up only of stories that did not involve the way minorities are treated differently and with less equity.

Perception.

When someone sees a film like Central Park Five and is able to write a critique about how it glosses over this fact or doesn't include that one, it is, in my opinion, clear evidence of what that person is lacking; actual lived experience with the subject. The further we are away from actually living a certain reality, the easier it is to doubt the facts pertaining to it, and this applies to average citizens watching the news, to police officers, to district attorneys, to mayors, to members of congress, and even the President. We are all unified under one permanent fact, our human perception and all its flaws.