The Cops Did It! Central Park II, Part Six

By Nicholas Stix
June 22, 2000

(This isn’t about the brutal, racist, April 19, 1989 black and Hispanic mob attacks and robberies of whites, and rape of a white woman in Central Park; it’s about the brutal, racist, June 11, 2000 black and Hispanic mob attacks, robberies and rapes of white women in Central Park.)

Central Park II, Part Six

If feminist leaders responded to the wilding with demagoguery, most black leaders preferred silence. The same leaders who for the past two years had never missed an opportunity to excoriate the NYPD (read: Rudy Giuliani), and blame it for an imaginary campaign of "racial profiling" against black men and boys, felt no outrage against the Central Park wolfpack. Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, and Harlem councilmen David Paterson and Bill Perkins, and worst of all, once gracious -- turned-vindictive ex-Mayor David N. Dinkins, so quick to attack Mayor Giuliani in the past, were silent. That these elected leaders did not attack Giuliani, is due to his having withdrawn from the Senate race against Lady Hillary! They have nothing to gain against a sick, lame-duck mayor [with prostate cancer], even if he is a white, male Republican. That black leaders did not condemn the violence is because New York's black leaders do not lead, but rather follow the mob. That's one of the main reasons -- George Will notwithstanding -- that race relations are so bad in New York, and elsewhere, too.

Many black folks will tell you the Central Park case is all about "race," but not the way I mean race. Take Mrs. Hattie Bryant. Please. Mrs. Bryant's son, Anthony, was wanted for the attacks, and turned himself in last week. And Mrs. Bryant knows why: "He's big and he's black." That's why they arrested him. He should sue everybody, starting with New York's Finest.

While he's at it, Anthony Bryant had better sue the amateur videographer who taped him at the scene of the crime, so that the police would know to seek him, as opposed to any other randomly chosen "big, black man." And he'd better sue the crime victim who positively identified him as one of her attackers. And most importantly, he'd better be sure to sue, and press criminal charges, as well, against the detectives who figured out that the crime victim had misidentified her attacker, whom the detectives said bore a striking resemblance to Bryant, and who had at one point stood next to him as the two passed each other at the crime scene, going in opposite directions.

Either Dave Goldiner and Edward Lewine, the Daily News reporters who spoke with Hattie Bryant, forgot to write her expressions of sympathy for the 50 white female victims, or their editors deleted those expressions from the reporters' final copy. But one thing the reporters and editors remembered to include was Hattie Bryant's verdict on guilt in the attacks: "The cops were the ones that was wrong. They shouldn't have turned their backs on the people."

The cops did it. Got it?

Hattie Bryant's criticism was echoed by Pat Taylor, the mother of arrested suspect John Taylor. Taylor is charged not with having touched any of the women (though he admits having thrown water on some of them), but rather with having been part of a gang that trapped one of the assault victims. Taylor was charged based on the legal principle of "acting in concert," whereby someone who helps a group commit crimes, and does nothing to stop it, is just as guilty as the group's most aggressive member. Mrs. Taylor's response was, "You're holding my son accountable for what the police shoulda did?"

It is understandable that Mrs. Taylor should look askance at the notion of "acting in concert," for it, too is one of many legal principles that are only "supposed to" be applied to white folks. In 1989, when a white mob cornered black teenager Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and a member of the mob, Joey Fama, shot and killed Hawkins, many members of the mob were initially charged under the principle of "acting in concert." At the time, black New Yorkers couldn't get enough of "acting in concert," because it was never used against blacks.

I have lived in New York City for 15 years; during most of that time, racist black-on-white attacks have been an everyday affair. I have fought off, endured, or bluffed my way out of several such black mob attacks myself. And yet, only in one trivial case have I heard of blacks being charged with bias crimes against whites, and until the Central Park rampage, I had never heard of blacks being charged with having acted in concert.

Yesterday, a Manhattan grand jury maintained that tradition, refusing to take action against John Taylor.