One Police Plaza

Ken Burns's Jogger Documentary: What He Ducked

April 8, 2019

Once again, PBS’s Channel 13 last week presented Ken Burns’s documentary on the Central Park jogger.

Once again, NYPD Confidential is going to tell you how Burns ducked an important part of the story.

Burns is one of the nation’s premier documentarians, having produced, among others, brilliant histories of the Civil War, baseball, the Dust Bowl and the Vietnam War. Why he chose to ignore certain facts in his Central Park jogger documentary remains unknown.

The jogger, a white female, was raped and beaten unconscious in Central Park on April 19, 1989. Five teenagers — four black and one Hispanic — were quickly arrested. Police maintained that the five, ages 14 to 16, had been part of a pack of 40 youths, roaming the park on that night, and had assaulted a homeless man, a male teacher, and a couple on a tandem bike. They were picked up near where the jogger was found unconscious and barely alive.

The five confessed to having beaten people in the park and having beaten the jogger, and implicated one other in her rape, though each denied having raped her. Based solely on that evidence — no DNA or anything else was found linking any of them to the rape — they were convicted and sent to prison.

Then in 2002, 13 years after the attack, Matias Reyes, a serial rapist and murderer serving a life sentence, confessed that he alone had raped the jogger. His DNA matched that found at the crime scene.

By then the Central Park Five, as they came to be known, had completed their sentences, which were vacated. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city settled the lawsuit, awarding them a $40 million settlement. Former mayor Mike Bloomberg had refused to settle this or virtually any high-profile lawsuits involving the police.

Meanwhile, the police department conducted its own investigation. Led by Michael Armstrong, who’d served as counsel to the Knapp Commission on police corruption 30 years before, the investigation concluded that it was “more likely than not” that the five teenagers had subjected the jogger to some sort of “hit and run” attack, consistent with their other activities that night.

However, Burns, who produced the documentary with daughter Sarah, presents the five as Little Lord Fauntleroys. Burns glides over a point made by his narrator, former New York Times columnist and top-notch investigative reporter Jim Dwyer, that even if they did not rape the jogger, the Central Park Five were hardly innocents.

Burns also ignored the entreaties of Armstrong. ”Sarah called me to tell me that she and her father were doing a documentary,” Armstrong told NYPD Confidential. “I took her to lunch at the Harvard Club and we talked for at least two hours. She was most pleasant and led me to believe that she was out to produce a fair, impartial presentation of what happened and the various theories surrounding the events. I agreed to be questioned on camera, and some months later went to Burns’s studio, where I spent a full afternoon in a taped question and answer session. I answered all questions put to me, volunteered information where I thought it would be helpful to do so, and pretty much covered our report’s factual findings, conclusions, criticism of police procedure and recommendations for reform. The questioning was thorough but not confrontational and I came away with the impression that they were going to do an objective job.

“A few months after that, Burns called me to say that they were not going to go into the matters about which I had been questioned so they wouldn’t be using the footage of my interview. He thanked me for my help.”