Netflix's "When They See Us" Is A Lesson On the Danger of Implicit Bias

It’s interesting that the first episode of director Ava DuVernay’s sprawling new miniseries, When They See Us opens with Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” The story begins in April 1989 with five Black and Latino New York City teens — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Jr., and Korey Wise — doing anything but paying attention to systemic racial injustice around them in a crack-cocaine ladened city. The teenage boys are preoccupied with trumpet solos in music class, cute girls on the block, good fried chicken, and the Yankees. They’re unaware that they would soon be arrested, convicted, and sent to jail for the sexual assault of a 28-year-old white woman found in Central Park — and that virtually their entire city would be rooting against them.

To understand how five innocent boys who would be referred to as the Central Park Five were sentenced for a heinous crime they didn’t commit is to flip the perspective away from them to a society hell-bent on justice at any cost, which is the crux of DuVernay’s narrative in the new Netflix series. From the cops who targeted them in the park and bullied them into false confessions to the prosecutors — led by Linda Fairstein (portrayed by Felicity Huffman as a particularly spiteful attorney) — and the dogged media coverage documenting the reports from a police unit that racially profiled, the fate of these teens had already been sealed. As the series details, they quickly went from typical high school students to a vilified “wolf pack”.

Donald Trump himself, then a brazen real estate heir, placed full-page ads in local papers demanding the five boys be given the death penalty.

Freddy Miyares, who plays Raymond as an adult tells Teen Vogue that he poured through countless articles that echoed this sentiment in preparation for the role. “I read every single article The New York Times posted about the case, beginning in 1989 to present day,” he says. “I wanted to fill myself with what the media was portraying because they had a large part in it.” The actor says the media was so powerful that it influenced the perspectives of not only the public but Raymond’s own stepmom, as depicted in the series. “That’s a consequence of people rushing to conclusions,” Freddy says. “People just bought what the media was feeding them. They didn’t look further. They chose to believe that their own kids were monsters.”

DuVernay traces the teens' tragic story throughout the initial trial in the fall of 1990, when Yusef, Antron, and Raymond were all acquitted of attempted murder, but convicted of rape, assault, robbery, and riot. In a second trial later that year, Kevin was convicted of attempted murder, rape, assault, and robbery, while Korey was convicted of sexual abuse, assault, and riot. The five young men served from 5 to 12 years in prison. The series' stirring final episode follows Korey, the only one tried as an adult, as he spends 12 years in jail, much of which are at Rikers Island.

The pervasive headlines incited some of the city’s racist sentiments against the five, which New York City attorney and CEO of LegalAdvice.com David Reischer says added pressure to the officers mounting a case against them. “Public outcry will always play some role in major cases, but it is important for law enforcement to follow the statutory rules that mitigate against police misconduct,” the attorney says. “For example, the New York City police in 1989 did not follow the statutory rules when questioning a juvenile, which mandate the participation of a parent during the course of such interviews." Adding, "Public outcry is no justification for disregarding statutory rules that impose restrictions on how police are permitted to conduct an investigation.”

But the police misconduct was never the focal point in the aggressive news coverage, says Natalie Byfield, a journalist covering the case for The New York Daily News at the time and the author of Savage Portrayals: Race, Media, and the Central Park Jogger Story. Nearly every article corroborated the flawed investigation.

“There was an intense amount of pressure from the upper echelon editors — who were primarily white men — to cover the dominant narrative that had been developed by the police and the prosecutors, which was that the teens were ‘wilding’ and looking for a white woman to rape,” Natalie states. "There was an avalanche of public sentiment generated against these teens. They never stood a chance."

That's partly because few reporters bothered to analyze the facts, which were that the police had no physical evidence against the teens, so they needed coerced confessions. When They See Us shows in harrowing detail each teen confined in a room for hours with an officer yelling at them to commit to such specific information, often implicating each other, that they can’t even keep it all straight. Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Joshua Ritter tells Teen Vogue, “If you’re an objective prosecutor and detective, you need to look at those confessions and [ask], ‘Are these kids trying to exculpate themselves or are they scared to death and saying whatever they feel they need to say?’”

As one of the few Black female journalists covering the case, Natalie was determined to more critically examine its racialized context, which she was only able to confirm by attending a press conference held by a youth action program that revealed information the media ignored. “I tried to cover how the police were operating [that night] in Central Park, assuming that the Black and Latino kids were up to no good,” she says. “There was a debate about whether or not this story was valid and needed to appear in the paper. Instead of running it as a Sunday story that would have gotten a lot of attention, it ran a month after I handed it in on the obit page and was cut down to less than half of the planned size. Any time you try to disrupt the narrative they’ve latched onto, this is how they operate.”

The actions of the police department, prosecution, and media indicted the five young men and supported systemic racism. But Freddy is hopeful that When They See Us will change that narrative. “I hope that this show creates consciousness in this country and encourage people to further inform themselves,” he says. “Don’t just consume what others tell you. This will continue to happen until we make some changes and educate our youth about their rights. As a minority group, we can help protect our youth from being exposed to such atrocities. Then hopefully law enforcement will be held accountable for their actions.”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue