Trump's True Agenda: Smoke and Mirrors, Autocracy and Corruption

Autocracy seems to be what form of government Donald Trump thinks this country is instead of a Democracy. His love and admiration for Vladimir Putin is poof. Besides this is his blatant disregard of laws and rules as well as his lack of morals and manners. 
This country is about to witness corruption similar to that which exist in Putin's Russia.

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Corruption in Russia is perceived as a significant problem in Russia impacting all aspects of life, including public administration, law enforcement, healthcare and education. The phenomenon of corruption is strongly established in the historical model of public governance in Russia and attributed to general weakness of rule of law in Russia. In the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International Russia was scored 136 in 2014.
A notable worsening of this ranking for Russia – from 90th place to 126th – occurred at the beginning of Vladimir Putin's second term as president; a drop of 36 places in only one year. An equally pessimistic picture emerges from the estimates of the average size of bribes which has substantially increased over the last five years.

According to economist Alexandra Kalinina corruption in Russia remains “not a problem, but a business.”

Corruption has penetrated all levels of government and most other aspects of life in Russia. According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, corruption in Russia is worse than in many African countries.

At the government level the five top areas for corruption are as follows:

1) Government contracts and purchases.
2) Issuance of permits and certificates.
3) Law-enforcement agencies.
4) Land distribution and land relations.

5) Construction.

Independent experts maintain that corruption consumes as much of 25 percent of Russia’s GDP. A World Bank report puts this figure at 48 percent. ~ Corruption in Russia as a Business Published: 29 January 2013 Written by Alexandra Kalinina

Trump's agenda will more than likely have our country in similar situation as in corruption filled Russia. Why else would most of his cabinet and advisors be millionaires, billionaires and generals? Why have most of them not submitted financial disclosures just as Trump has yet revealed his tax records and forms? Too many global conflicts of interest are not being revealed and we the people are supposed to just allow this to go down without a fight? NOT AT ALL! As patriots we must oppose this tyranny.

Trump's make America Great and White again was the message and tactic used to get him in the White House. It was a part of the smoke and mirrors. Now he is on his way to autocracy and corruption like we have never seen in this country at the highest levels of the government. Everything seems upside down!

  

Police Shoot & Kill Unarmed Terence Crutcher While His Hands Are Up.

Video shows US police shoot and kill unarmed black man

Footage released by Oklahoma police shows Terence Crutcher shot and killed by white officer while his hands are up.

A US police department in Oklahoma has released video of an encounter in which an unarmed black man was shot dead by a white officer while his hands were up.

Video recorded by a police helicopter and a patrol car's dashboard camera were released by the Tulsa police department on Monday show 40-year-old Terence Crutcher being shocked with a stun gun and then shot dead.

In the encounter, which happened at about 7:40pm on Friday, Betty Shelby, a Tulsa police officer since 2011, shoots once and kills Crutcher while responding to a stalled vehicle report, according to the police department.
A man in the police helicopter circling above the scene can be heard saying during the incident: "Time for a Taser," and "That looks like a bad dude, too. Probably on something."


When a second police car arrived as back-up, Crutcher had his hands up as he walked away from Shelby, who was following him with her gun pointed at his back. She was soon joined by three more officers, according to the dashboard video of the second squad car.
Crutcher was shot less than 30 seconds after the second car arrived, US media reported.

Before the release of the incident's video and audio recordings, Police Chief Chuck Jordan announced that Crutcher had no weapon on him or in his four-wheel drive vehicle.

The initial moments of Crutcher's encounter with police are not shown in the footage.

Dashboard cam off

Shelby did not activate her patrol car's dashboard cam, said Tulsa police spokeswoman Jeanne MacKenzie. Only the second patrol car's dashboard cam was on.

Local and federal investigations are under way to determine whether criminal charges are warranted in the shooting or if Crutcher's civil rights were violated.

It is not clear from the footage what led Shelby to draw her gun or what orders officers might have given Crutcher.


Initial police briefings indicated that Crutcher was not obeying officers' commands, but MacKenzie said on Monday that she did not know what Crutcher was doing that prompted police to shoot.
After the shooting, Crutcher could be seen lying on the side of the road, a pool of blood around his body, for nearly two minutes before anyone checked on him.

When asked why police did not provide immediate assistance once Crutcher was down, MacKenzie said, "I do not know that we have protocol on how to render aid to people."

Crutcher's twin sister, Tiffany Crutcher, called for charges on Monday.

"The big bad dude was my twin brother. That big bad dude was a father," she said.

"That big bad dude was a son. That big bad dude was enrolled at Tulsa Community College, just wanting to make us proud. That big bad dude loved God. That big bad dude was at church singing with all of his flaws, every week. That big bad dude, that's who he was."

Terence Crutcher was shot and killed by police in Tulsa., Okla., on Friday, in a case that has prompted a Justice Department investigation.
Tulsa Police

The video is disturbing and prompts many questions — and that's how the police see it. The family of Terence Crutcher, who was shot dead by police Friday, says the footage should lead to criminal charges against the officer who killed an unarmed man.

The Justice Department has begun a parallel investigation into possible civil rights charges related to Crutcher's death, U.S. Attorney Danny Williams Sr. said Monday. He promised "to seek justice on behalf of this family, and for the public."

Crutcher, who was black, died next to his SUV that had stopped in the middle of a two-lane road in Tulsa, Okla. Seconds before he was shot, police dashcam and helicopter footage shows, he had walked to his car with his hands held over his head as Officer Betty Shelby walked behind him, her gun raised.


We'll post the helicopter video and link to more footage here, with the warning that some of the video is graphic and may be difficult to watch.
In the recording from the Tulsa police helicopter, an officer is heard saying of Crutcher as he walks in front of Shelby, "Looks like that's a bad dude, maybe on something."

Officers had been called to the scene by passers-by who had reported a vehicle abandoned in the road. "He took off running," a woman told a 911 operator, saying that the man said his vehicle might blow up. She added, "I think he's smoking something."

Shelby, who is white, was one of four police officers who were standing at the rear bumper of Crutcher's car as he stood next to his vehicle around 7:45 p.m. Friday. She's also the officer who shot him once, in the upper body — and who then radioed, "Shots fired." Police say another officer used his Taser on Crutcher at nearly the same time he was shot.

"I want to assure our community, and I want to assure all of you and people across the nation who are going to be looking at this, we will achieve justice, period," Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan said Monday, as his department released the videos. He called the footage "very disturbing; it's very difficult to watch."

Officer Shelby's attorney, Scott Wood, told the Tulsa World that Shelby believed Crutcher was reaching for something inside his car, and that he hadn't been following her commands.

"I'm going to tell you right here and now: There was no gun on the suspect or in the suspect's vehicle," Jordan said of Crutcher. The police chief said he contacted the U.S. Attorney's Office about the case immediately after the shooting, and he added, "We will achieve justice in this case."


Jordan said that the first time he watched the police-cam footage was when he viewed it with Crutcher's family — something he said he did on Sunday, to give the slain man's relatives a chance to see the video before anyone else.
"After watching the video and seeing what actually happened," said Tiffany Crutcher, Terence's twin sister, "we're truly devastated. The entire family is devastated."

Tiffany Crutcher then went on to tell the media gathered in Tulsa, "You all want to know who that big 'bad dude' was. That big 'bad dude' was my twin brother. That big 'bad dude' was a father. That big 'bad dude' was a son. That big 'bad dude' was enrolled at Tulsa Community College, just wanting to make us proud.

"That big 'bad dude' loved God; that big 'bad dude' was at church singing, with all his flaws, every week. That's who he was."


Tiffany Crutcher said her brother's future was taken away because of negligence and incompetence — "and because he was a big 'bad dude.'"
Demanding charges for the officers involved, Tiffany Crutcher said of her brother, "His life mattered."

Referring to other incidents of police killings of unarmed black men, she added, "This is bigger than us right here. We're going to stop it right here."

The time code in the video taken from the dashcam of Officer Tyler Turnbough shows that Crutcher was shot around 1:50 into the recording. Over the radio, an officer can be heard referring to him as a "suspect" — although the situation was initially called in as a traffic incident, possibly involving a broken-down vehicle.

After Shelby shot Crutcher, two officers walked to the opposite side of the vehicle to ensure the scene was safe; a female officer is then seen running away from the immediate area. Moments later, three officers, seemingly including Shelby, backed slowly away from Crutcher's body. They then crouched down behind a police cruiser.

Crutcher was left alone on the asphalt until around the 3:45 mark in the video, when an officer checks his pockets; it isn't until around 4:30 that anyone crouches down to render any aid.

The police department says Betty Jo Shelby, 42, joined the force in December of 2011. Tulsa World reports that she had previously worked at the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office.


"Please, maintain the peace," Jordan said at his news conference. He added, "Protests are not a problem. ... I grew up in the '60s; it's a very valid way for people to air their grievances."

Structural racism in the US won't diminish with time

We must identify and dismantle the institutions that mark Blackness as criminal and disposable.

Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, was shot and killed by Baton Rouge police on July 5. Less than 24 hours later, Philando Castile, a black Minnesota man five years his junior, was shot dead by police outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The police homicides were the 558th and 559th extrajudicial police killings of 2016, and in the direct aftermath of July 4, stark and sudden reminders that the disproportionate targeting of black men and women by police - an age-old American tradition - unravelled on the streets just like fireworks exploded in the night sky. 

Both killings were captured on video. Castile was shot four times in his stomach, shortly after he reached for his identification, in line with police orders. His fiancee, Diamond Reynolds, videotaped his execution with their four-year old daughter watching from the back seat. Americans, from their telephones and computers, watched shortly after.

After an encounter with two Baton Rouge policemen, Sterling was killed outside of the Triple S Mart. The two policemen arrested Sterling, and while pinning him to the ground, at least one of them shot him and took his life.

Mundane nature of their actions

Castile was pulled over for allegedly having a broken tail light and  Sterling was selling C's to the Baton Rouge convenience store, activities that for most of America should not result in arrest, let alone death.

However, Castile and Sterling were black men, and the threat posed by their bodies alone superceded, and altogether extinguished, the mundane nature of their actions for the arresting policemen.

This racial construction of blackness is what triggers the disproportionate arrest, incarceration, and extrajudicial execution of black men and women.

Black bodies are systematically linked to criminality, and perceived as threatening even when unarmed, following police orders, or being manhandled by two officers. 

This "weaponization of blackness" is a cornerstone of the structural racism that pervades police departments in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, and law enforcement agencies between and beyond them.

It is the very lifeline of the growing mistrust for police in black communities, and the crux of the marching orders driving the Black Lives Matter movement forward.

While much of America views the execution of Sterling and Castile as the aberrant acts of deviant cops, black America understands them as foreseeable consequences of coordinated policing structures and strategies.

Racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and "broken windows" law enforcement are all carefully coordinated policing strategies, which causally link blackness to a higher propensity of criminality. Cadets are trained accordingly, and subsequently, expected to enforce the law in line with this baseline.

The system is not broken

Indeed, the system is not broken. But designed to police, punish and prosecute black men and women as it does.  Particularly in poor and working class geographies, where patrol cars and plainclothes police are more pervasive, and as starkly illustrated in Baton Rouge on Tuesday night, more inclined to exact more intimate and deadly violence. 

The fruit of US law enforcement may be strange, but it is calculable. The natural progeny of embedded structures that leave black women dead in jail cells, black men bleeding to death in cars, and the bodies of black teenagers uncovered and uncollected on hot, sticky city streets for hours.

Structural racism does not diminish with time but rather adjusts to prevailing political norms and sensibilities.

Beyond Black America, however, structural racism is merely a phrase. An abstract phenomenon that is regurgitated by pundits and is ubiquitous on social media, yet seldom understood because it has not been experienced with the same frequency and ferocity.

Indeed, understanding the depths of systemic racism is born most out of experiencing it, and more specifically, enduring the recurring violence and dehumanisation that comes with it.

For (non-black) Muslim Americans, the protracting national security state and state-sponsored Islamophobia - which links religiosity to propensity for terrorism, or  "radicalisation", enables city law enforcement personnel to spy on on Muslim subjects, and seed informants in places of worship. Indeed, another institutional manifestation of structural racism whereby an entire policing model is based almost entirely on stereotyped threat - instead of statistical evidence. 

Latin Americans sit at the intersection of violent criminal policing and immigration enforcement.  Converging mechanisms of state policing that associate Latino identity with an enhanced propensity of criminality, on one hand, and undocumented status on the other.

Genuine solidarity

For non-black communities of colour, genuine solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives exists somewhere between sympathy and education. Namely, a literacy associated with understanding how anti-terror and immigration policing are not only kindred forms of structural racism, but more importantly, ones rooted in the very structures that have bonded, bloodied and broken blacks in America for centuries and, as evidenced in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, are still taking place, without hitch, and according to plan.

For non-black allies, sustainable solidarity may begin with marching, protesting or posting "Black Lives Matter" on social media platforms. But it ends with identifying, then seeking to dismantle, the institutions that mark blackness as criminal and disposable, which have been extended to brand brown bodies as suspicious, terrorists, or illegal.

Solidarity isn't merely an act of altruism or coalition building in the United States today. But for Americans of colour, faced with the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency, a necessary step of self-preservation. 

Khaled A Beydoun is an Associate Law Professor with the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law.  He is Affiliated Faculty at UC-Berkeley, and a native of Detroit.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Central Park Five: Teacher Jeena Lee-Walker Fired Over Lesson Plans On Administrator Fears Of Inciting 'Riots'

Raymond Santana, right, Kevin Richardson, and Yusef Salaam, left, react to supporters Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013, in New York. The three men who were exonerated in the 1989 Central Park Jogger case.

Teacher Says She Was Fired For Teaching Students About The Central Park Five

BY CASEY QUINLAN JAN 8, 2016 11:37 AM

A New York City high school teacher says she was fired after teaching her class about the Central Park Five — a case involving five black and Hispanic men who were accused of raping a jogger as teenagers but later exonerated after spending between six to 13 years in prison — because administrators were worried the lesson would “rile up” students of color.

Central Park Five members defend teacher who claims she was fired for teaching the case



The English teacher, Jeena Lee-Walker (pictured below), told the New York Daily News that administrators at her former high school critiqued the 2013 lesson, saying it should have been more “balanced.” Court papers show administrators said they feared the lesson would cause “riots.” And according to Lee-Walker, administrators were afraid the lesson would “rile up” the black students in her class.


In her interview with the Daily News, Lee-Walker said she thought “students in general, and black students in particular, should be riled up” about the case, which is often held up as an example of how the criminal justice system unfairly targets young men of color. But she subsequently received bad performance reviews and eventually received a dismissal.

Lee-Walker has since filed suit against the Department of Education and school administrators for failing to give her 60 days notice about her termination, which violates the teacher’s union contract.

The story has attracted a lot of attention from educators — and especially from teachers who are concerned about teacher diversity and who say this type of action from administrators may hobble teachers of color professionally. Jose Vilson, a middle school math educator in the Inwood/Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City and the author of This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and the Future of Education, sent several tweets criticizing the administrators for their comments.

UWS High School Teacher Claims She Was Fired For "Central Park Five" Lessons

BY BEN YAKAS IN NEWS ON JAN 8, 2016 5:30 PM

English teacher Jeena Lee-Walker screenshot via Daily News

An English teacher at an Upper West Side high school claims that she was fired because of a lesson on the Central Park Five which administrators warned her would "rile up" black students.
Jeena Lee-Walker, 37, is suing the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry after she was fired for insubordination and poor evaluations, all of which she believes was the result of her pushing back on topics like the Central Park Five.
Lee-Walker tells the Daily News that her problems with administrators started almost immediately after she started working at the school in 2013. She says she was shocked when she was told to be more "balanced" covering the case of the Central Park Five in November 2013: "I was stunned,” she told the News. "I was kind of like, the facts are the facts. This is what happened. These boys went to jail and lost 14, 18 years of their lives. How can you say that in a more balanced way?"
Although she agreed to change her approach, she felt that students had good reason to be "riled up," telling the News, "I kind of wanted to hook them in, engage them, win them over. I thought that this material was not only engaging but important...They were really moved by the documentary and rightly so. They really identified with the teenagers."
Lee-Walker argues in her lawsuit that retaliation against her "violated her First Amendment right to discuss the Central Park Five case, and that the firing violated the city’s contract with the teacher’s union because she was not given a required 60 days notice."
The Central Park Five, who were wrongfully jailed for the 1989 rape of a Central Park jogger, have received a $42 million settlement from the city in recent years. In 2014, they sued the state seeking $52 million in damages for the emotional trauma of being incarcerated for years for a crime they were coerced into confessing to.

Teacher Fired for Heroic Incompetence

 by ADAM LAATS on JANUARY 10, 2016

http://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/

I’m no cynic. But anyone who’s paying attention knows that schools serve a range of purposes. We see depressing evidence today that one of their primary functions is to contain and control young people. How do we know? Because a teacher in New York City was fired, according to her, for talking about structural racism in a way that would “rile up” her African American students. Yikes.

The story is grim. Jeena Lee-Walker has sued New York schools for her termination. Beginning in 2012, school administrators asked her to tone down her teaching about the Central Park Five case. As all New Yorkers remember, a group of young men were falsely convicted of raping a woman. They were eventually freed, but only after spending long years in prison.

Lee-Walker taught her students about the case. Many of them, she thought, “should be riled up” about the deep injustice done, as well as about continuing injustices in American society.

Her administrators thought differently. They gave her several bad evaluations and eventually fired her for “insubordination.”

Let me be crystal clear here: I think all teachers should be like Ms. Lee-Walker. All teachers should “rile up” their students about injustices in our society.

But we need to recognize two complicating factors. Though I’m a big fan of his, I think Curmudgucrat Peter Greene misses the boat here when he says Lee-Walker was “fired for competence.”

She was fired for two other reasons, reasons central to the successful functioning of any school. Even as we praise Ms. Lee-Walker’s bravery and integrity, we need to be a little more clearheaded about what was really going on. In short, Ms. Lee-Walker’s unwillingness to go along with the school system really DID make her incompetent as a teacher. Heroic, yes, but not willing to do the job.

That might sound odd, so let me offer two long-winded explanations.

First, teachers are not simply private citizens. Ms. Lee-Walker will not have luck protesting that her First Amendment rights have been breached. And, by and large, none of us want to cede to teachers such rights. Consider, for example, what we might think if she had been accused of promoting political or religious agendas with which we don’t agree. What if she “riled up” students by denouncing abortion? Or by denouncing evolution?

In principle, then, we need to acknowledge that teachers are bound to stick within curricular guidelines established by the school and community. I’ll repeat: in this case I think those guidelines are utterly bogus. I think we should encourage all New York City high schools to emulate Ms. Lee-Walker’s decision to teach the Central Park Five case. It is the truth and young people deserve to learn about it.

But if and when a heroic teacher decides to go against her superiors, she should be prepared to be kicked out. That is equally true whether we agree or disagree with the teacher’s ideas. I’m going to say this again, just because I think it could be misinterpreted: In this case, I side wholly with Ms. Lee-Walker. Her protest, however, should not be taken as a simple case of good teaching vs. evil administrating. Rather, this is a heroic attempt to push the curriculum in New York City schools toward this sort of teaching. Ms. Lee-Walker should have expected to get fired—even WANTED to get fired—because that was her only chance to take her appeal to a wider stage.


We don’t have to like it, but I think we need to be clear about our terms. In this sort of case, the closest analogy is that of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses. To some, she was a hero, to others a poorly coiffed villain. In the end, however, she was a government bureaucrat who refused to do her job. Whatever we think of her politics or religion, no institution can function if it doesn’t purge such folks.

That brings us to our second point. This story drives home the depressing custodial role schools and teachers play in our society. We tend to think of schools as educational institutions—and they are—but they are also holding pens of varying levels of pleasantness.

As a result, a big part of the job of school administrators is to keep the students relatively calm. With a dizzyingly high student-to-teacher ratio, most schools rely on passive and compliant students. When and if students choose to throw off schools’ restraints, there is not much administrators can physically do to coerce them into submission.

In some schools, this results at worst in hijinx such as food fights. In other schools, we get a prison-like atmosphere in which students are continually monitored and physically controlled.

Is that a good thing? Not at all. But if we want to make sense of this case and the many other cases like this, we need to understand the many things that schools do in our society. Teachers are not merely Socratic wisdom-peddlers in the agora. They are street-level bureaucrats who help process large numbers of young people in educational containment systems.


The point of Ms. Lee-Walker’s actions—if she was acting intentionally—was not merely to teach children something true. The point was to make a public spectacle of the fact that New York City schools do not regularly include that sort of teaching. She was not “fired for competence,” but for her stubborn insistence on principled incompetence, her brave unwillingness to go along with a system that fails students so miserably.

Raymond Santana (c.), one of the members of the Central Park Five, came to the defense of a Manhattan teacher who says she was fired for teaching the case in her classroom.

Central Park Five members defend teacher who claims she was fired for teaching the case

BY VICTORIA BEKIEMPIS, STEPHEN REX BROWN, RICH SCHAPIRO  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Friday, January 8, 2016, 2:57 PM

(From l.) Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Yusef Salaam spent several years in prison after they were wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger in 1989.

Two members of the Central Park Five came to the defense Friday of an Upper West Side teacher who claims she was fired for building a curriculum around the notorious case.

“We're with her 100% to fight this injustice," Raymond Santana, 41, told the Daily News.

“We would love to be down at the federal courthouse when she goes in" and give “any other support that is needed.”

“I absolutely appreciate her and absolutely commend her," he said. "Anything (she and her lawyer) need, we will be here — and be ready."

Santana and Salaam spoke out a day after the Daily News revealed Lee-Walker’s claims that she was canned for teaching her students at the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry about the racially charged case.


Yusef Salaam, 41, offered a similar vow to stand behind axed teacher Jeena Lee-Walker.

Walker’s Central Park Five program explored the travails of the five black and Latino teens who spent several years in prison after they were wrongfully convicted of raping a female jogger in 1989.

Lee-Walker, 37, was fired in May after school administrators told her to tone down the curriculum because they feared the lessons would “rile up” black students and trigger mini “riots,” according to a federal lawsuit filed by the axed teacher.


Lee-Walker says she was accused of insubordination and given poor evaluations after she pushed back against the administrators’ demands.

Lee-Walker, who graduated from Barnard and has post-grad degrees from Harvard and Fordham, did not specify damages in her suit.

Santana, who spent seven years behind bars for the crime, said he was “troubled” by the suit’s description of the administrators’ claiming the lessons might incite a riot.


"It takes us back to 1989, where the media put these labels on us — that we were animals," he said.

"A person working in the school system shouldn't view our kids like that."

Salaam said the news of Lee-Walker’s treatment has triggered painful memories.

“For us, in terms of the Central Park Five, it’s like we're being tried and prosecuted all over again,” said Salaam who was also imprisoned for seven years.


"There are lots of people out there who truly feel like we are guilty of something.” 

Donald Trump and the Central Park Five

BY AMY DAVIDSON JUNE 23, 2014

Kharey Wise as he looked when he was arraigned, in 1989, in the Central Park jogger case. Photograph by John Pedin/NY Daily News Archive/Getty.

Donald Trump is angry about the settlement the city reached, this weekend, with the Central Park Five—the men who had, as teen-age boys, been wrongly convicted in the “Central Park jogger” rape case and been called animals by just about every institution in this city. The rape had been committed between 9 or 10 P.M., on an April evening in 1989; someone had beaten the jogger so badly and so brutally that by the time she was found, hours later, stripped and covered with mud, she had lost three quarters of her blood. The police detective on the scene told reporters that her body had already turned cold; she wouldn’t have survived much longer. The woman, as she later let the world know in a book, was Trisha Meili, then an investment banker at Salomon Brothers; she had been bashed in the head and remembered nothing. The rest of New York, though, was sure of what had happened to her, and who was to blame. Here was the headline in the Daily News, on April 21, 1989:

WOLF PACK’S PREY
Female jogger near death after savage attack by roving gang


And the headline from the next day:

Park marauders call it
‘WILDING’
…and it’s street slang for going berserk
The Times, that same week, reported, “The youths who raped and savagely beat a young investment banker as she jogged in Central Park Wednesday night were part of a loosely organized gang of 32 schoolboys whose random, motiveless assaults terrorized at least eight other people over nearly two hours, senior police investigators said yesterday.” And: “she was raped by at least 4 of the 12 boys, Chief Colangelo said.” The five schoolboys who were eventually tried—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise—were all black or Hispanic.

And, in early May, 1989, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in the Daily News to say what he thought he knew about the case. Trump was on the front page of the papers often enough that season; the Post’s “SPLIT!” headline marking the end of his marriage would help fill the tabloid space between the teen-agers’ arrest and their conviction, as did “MARLA BOASTS TO HER PALS ABOUT DONALD: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD,’ ” which quoted his then-mistress and second wife; soon, there was also coverage of his baroque business failures. Perhaps he thought it gave him gravitas, that spring, to weigh in on the character of the teen-agers in the park: “How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” And his headline suggested what ought to be done with them:

BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.
BRING BACK OUR POLICE!
The “park marauders,” the “roving gang,” the “crazed misfits” were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years old. The confessions they gave, as children, had been false, spun out under the pressure of hours of police interrogations. (They were, had anyone been ready to acknowledge it at the time, also inconsistent; they also had parents whom they weren’t able to see before their questioning.) The boys were sent to prison. One of them, Kharey Wise, who at sixteen was the oldest and sentenced as an adult, was still there when, eleven years after the rape in the park, he happened to cross paths with a prisoner named Matias Reyes. It occurred to Reyes that it was his fault that Wise was there. He confessed that he, and he alone, had raped and beaten Meili, as he had raped other women over the years. He described to police how he had tied her with her clothes; it had been part of his M.O. in other cases, something that gave credibility to his confession. It moved beyond a doubt when a DNA test matched Reyes to the semen found on Meili’s body. The DNA hadn’t matched any of the teen-agers—one of the many details that got blinked over in the trial. They were exonerated twelve years ago, and the charges were formally dropped.

Since then, talks about some form of restitution for the young men dragged on even as a movie, “The Central Park Five,” gave a wider perspective on the real injustice in the case—the failure of the police, the courts, the press, of the word on the street, of any engine of public doubt. Everything that should have struck one as odd—the cartoonish way that the boys, in their confessions, talked about the rape itself—was taken as proof of the boys’ perversity. Their guilt had been a given; the only question that people seemed interested in, at the time, was what their supposed wildness said about our society, about the boys’ ”culture,” or lack of it. A real-estate developer could take out an ad that contemplated executing children, and only be considered disreputable because of the decor of his buildings.

The Daily News reprinted that ad on Saturday, next to Trump’s new op-ed. Perhaps he feels that he got a good deal, having the ad run again for free; there is no contrition in what he has to say now. The settlement, which Mayor Bill de Blasio had said, in his campaign, he wanted to get done, gives each man about a million dollars for each year he spent in jail. (Together, that was forty years.) Trump wrote on Saturday that this was “a disgrace”; he said that he’d talked to a detective who called it “the heist of the century.” How much would Donald Trump pay to not spend a single year in jail? He doesn’t mention Reyes; he talks about police “blunders” as if they were all in the teen-agers’ favor—“The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city.” Does he imagine that it must be obvious to them, as it is to him, that the decades of their lives weren’t worth much anyway? He wrote, “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.” At fourteen years old, one doesn’t have much of a past to speak of; what one might have is a future. Or is an angel, for Trump, someone who stays in a hotel with a lot of gold paint on the wall?

It’s simple, in some ways, to see the Central Park jogger case as an artifact of a feverish moment in late-eighties New York—of a piece with its joyous and awful kinetics, the crack epidemic, the painted-over subways, the fear of AIDS, the absurdity of Ivana’s ski-slope confrontation with Marla. But some fevers never seem to subside. The tendency to write off teen-age boys because of distrust of their neighborhoods or the color of their skin, to assume that jail is the place for them, has not gone away. Neither, somehow, has Donald Trump.