Ava DuVer­nay ral­lies against crim­i­nal injus­tice in When They See Us

True to her jour­nal­is­tic back­ground – the same that saw her cov­er­ing the OJ Simp­son tri­al for CBS News back in the day – Ava DuVer­nay con­tin­ues to delve deep into America’s Crim­i­nal Jus­tice Sys­tem. Fol­low­ing her 2016 doc­u­men­tary, 13^th, which exam­ined the inter­sec­tion of race and mass incar­cer­a­tion in the US, the Net­flix minis­eries When They See Us feels like a nat­ur­al evo­lu­tion of the director’s work, one that is marked by the urgency she feels sur­round­ing the sub­ject of racial dis­par­i­ties, wrong­ful con­vic­tions and the ​“land of the free” being home to 25 per cent of the world’s prison population.

As DuVer­nay explained in an inter­view with Oprah Win­frey, “[In 13^th] I want­ed to explore the prison indus­tri­al com­plex – prison as indus­try, prison as busi­ness, peo­ple prof­it­ing off pun­ish­ment. That’s what I thought this whole thing would be about. So, as I was try­ing to explain what was hap­pen­ing now, it became unrea­son­able and incom­plete to try to tell the sto­ry of now, with­out telling the sto­ry of the past.” Hence, in order to get a clear sense of how cas­es such as that of the Cen­tral Park Five con­tin­ue to hap­pen, one must first under­stand the spine around which the Amer­i­can prison sys­tem was formed: name­ly, African-Amer­i­cans and Latinos.

“The way that we appeal to vot­ers’ sense of fear and anx­i­ety in our nation runs through black bod­ies,” Khalil Gibran Muham­mad, Har­vard Ken­ny School pro­fes­sor and author of ​‘The Con­dem­na­tion of Black­ness: Race, Crime and the Mak­ing of Mod­ern Urban Amer­i­ca’, explains in 13^th. When They See Us dri­ves this fact home by pre­sent­ing a sad­ly typ­i­cal case of African-Amer­i­can fam­i­lies being torn apart and young lives for­ev­er destroyed over wrong­ful con­vic­tions that have shaped entire, mar­gin­alised communities.

In ​‘Part I’, the boys appre­hend­ed at Cen­tral Park – ini­tial­ly as wit­ness­es – are imme­di­ate­ly referred to as ​“ani­mals” by the police, and it is this racial prej­u­dice that caus­es minor­i­ty par­ents to drill safe­ty tac­tics into their chil­dren, prepar­ing them for ​“prop­er con­duct” in the evi­dent of them com­ing in con­tact with the law. This form of con­duct, how­ev­er, does not guar­an­tee safe­ty; whether you run from the police or throw your hands up in sur­ren­der, as a minor­i­ty fig­ure, your safe­ty in the hands of the law is nev­er cer­tain. It wasn’t in the ​’60s, not in the ​’80s, and def­i­nite­ly not today.

The same focus on ​“minor­i­ty slang” was evi­denced in the Cather­ine Fuller case from 1984, where law offi­cials chose to fab­ri­cate a crim­i­nal gang based on the dis­trict com­mu­ni­ty refer­ring to the ​“H on 8^th Crew” dur­ing live musi­cal events. As we learn in When They See Us, the var­i­ous groups of youths who took to Cen­tral Park on the night Trisha Meili was assault­ed and raped used the term ​“wild­ing”, some­thing that can only be described as inno­cent, albeit some­what unruly, teenage fun.

This term was imme­di­ate­ly pounced upon by the head of the DA’s sex crime unit, Lin­da Fairstein (played by Felic­i­ty Hoff­man in the show) and her col­leagues, who were intent on paint­ing an entire­ly crim­i­nal­is­ing and daunt­ing image of what ​“wild­ing” con­sti­tutes. Add to that the merg­ing of the words, ​“ani­mals”, ​“wolf pack” and ​“wild­ing”, and soon the pub­lic had the fod­der need­ed to buy into a nar­ra­tive based on fab­ri­cat­ed state­ments and prej­u­dice rather than sol­id evidence.

In the pre­mière episode, we see law offi­cials try­ing to form a time­line of the crime that places their five main sus­pects on the scene – despite a 45-minute dis­crep­an­cy between the order of events, loca­tions and time­lines. Mean­while, the sus­pects – 14-year-old Kevin Richard­son (Asante Blackk), 15-year-olds Antron McCray (Caleel Har­ris), Yusef Salaam (Chris Chalk) and Ray­mond San­tana (Mar­quis Rodriguez) – are held in cus­tody for 18 hours straight, with­out food, rest and, in the case of Yusef, a legal guardian present. Par­ents arriv­ing at the precinct, such as Antron’s father, Bob­by McCray (Michael K Williams), are sub­tly threat­ened and advised to play along rather than plead their children’s inno­cence. And it is this grue­some, incom­pre­hen­si­ble, emo­tion­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal black­mail, that ends up destroy­ing families.

The minors are repeat­ed­ly made to feel alien­at­ed and crim­i­nalised mere­ly for their racial back­grounds, ter­rorised into a state of fear and final­ly forced into a series of false con­fes­sions, with each of the sus­pects con­firm­ing what offi­cials want to hear: that they were wit­ness to their friends beat­ing and rap­ing Meili. And so, Kevin places Antron at the scene of the crime and vice ver­sa. In a heart­break­ing scene, Bob­by des­per­ate­ly tries to con­vince his son Antron to admit to the crime. He has expe­ri­enced what it means to be a black man in the hands of the law and knows that, the con­clu­sions to cas­es like this typ­i­cal­ly end the same: “[The Police will] lie on us, they’ll lock us up and they will kill us.”

Korey Wise (Jhar­rel Jerome) wasn’t even on the list of sus­pects round­ed up by the police, but accom­pa­nied his friend Yusef to the sta­tion, believ­ing his moth­er would have want­ed him to. While his friends are inter­ro­gat­ed, Korey is left to sleep. It’s not until law offi­cials are called out for hav­ing col­lect­ed incon­sis­tent state­ments, that they decide to include Korey in the nar­ra­tive. They achieve this by beat­ing the boy and threat­en­ing to destroy his own life; when his state­ment is final­ly record­ed, he is the one to admit to the rape. Fol­low­ing the tri­al, he is the only one of the five to be tried as an adult.

Con­sist­ing of four episodes, DuVernay’s minis­eries explores the full 13-year time­line of this infa­mous case – from the events sur­round­ing the night of 19 April, 1989, to the first tri­al in August, 1990, to the respec­tive boys’ jour­neys through the prison sys­tem, to the after­math fol­low­ing the con­fes­sion of the real attack­er, Matias Reyes in 2002 – as well as Don­ald Trump’s involve­ment in feed­ing into the ​“wolf pack” image of the boys through a series of full-page ads in pop­u­lar nation­al news­pa­pers: ​‘Bring Back The Death Penal­ty. Bring Back Our Police!’

This only fuelled the lynch mob rhetoric and soon despi­ca­ble char­ac­ters such as Pat Buchanan were chim­ing in with their own ideas of jus­tice. Fol­low­ing Trump’s approach to sys­tem­at­ic racism, Buchanan insist­ed that Wise should be ​“hanged in Cen­tral Park”. In his opin­ion, the oth­er boys deserved noth­ing less than to be ​“stripped, horse­whipped, and sent to prison.”

Suc­ceed­ing where The Con­fes­sion Tapes large­ly failed, When They See Us hits hard on a human lev­el, offer­ing an emo­tion­al­ly-charged recon­struc­tion of events, tak­ing us on a painstak­ing jour­ney through the prison sys­tem, and show­ing the wider impact on fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ties at large, thanks to an amaz­ing cast of actors and DuVernay’s skilled sto­ry­telling. Cru­cial­ly, the series leaves no room for view­ers to doubt the boys who became known as the Cen­tral Park Five. On the con­trary, it deft­ly expos­es the mis­in­for­ma­tion the pub­lic has been fed for decades, encour­ag­ing us all to ral­ly­ing against a sys­tem that can no longer be con­sid­ered lawful.