‘Central Park 5’ Councilman Yusef Salaam presses NYPD on wrongful convictions

City Councilman Yusef Salaam, in his first hearing as chairman of the Public Safety Committee, referenced Monday his imprisonment in the Central Park jogger case while pressing the NYPD to explain how it tries to prevent wrongful convictions.

“As I know from lived experience, wrongful convictions cause irreparable damage,” the Harlem Democrat said in his opening remarks at the City Hall hearing.

“These miscarriages of justice also can contribute to an erosion of the public trust in the criminal justice system. There is a moral necessity for police departments to examine their internal practices and ensure steps are taken to mitigate the risk of wrongful convictions.”

Salaam, a political novice, was elected last year. He was wrongfully convicted as a teenager and imprisoned nearly seven years before his exoneration.

Heading the Public Safety Committee, the scene of some of the most heated hearings in the Council’s recent history, is one of the body’s most high-profile jobs, entailing oversight of the NYPD and other agencies. The hearing came after Salaam was recently stopped by NYPD cops for excessively tinted windows while he was driving in Harlem, leading to no arrests but sparking heated citywide debate.
NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny testified Monday there are numerous safeguards in place today that didn’t exist in 1989, when Salaam and four other teens were arrested and charged with raping Trisha Meili in Central Park, a headline-grabbing case that divided the city along racial lines. Salaam is Black. The four others are Black or Latino, and Meili, who was so badly injured she cannot recall what happened that night, is white.

“We have taken a variety of steps over the years to improve investigative procedures,” Kenny said. “But we recognize the human element and that witnesses make mistakes. That is why we have strict procedures regarding witness identifications.”

All interrogations are now fully videotaped, Kenny said, and most identifications are now made not with lineups but with photo arrays.

With a suspect in custody, for instance, their picture is put in an envelope with mug shots from five others who have similar looks. The envelope is then sealed, with a detective who has nothing to do with the investigation asking the witness or victim to open the envelope and indicate if anyone looks like the suspect.

“We care deeply about preventing wrongful convictions,” Kenny said. “We have to get it right.”

Salaam talked at length about Matias Reyes, the convicted sexual predator who in 2002 came forward to claim he alone raped the jogger. The stunning claim helped the Central Park 5 clear their names and dub themselves the Exonerated 5.

Reyes, two months after the jogger attack, raped and murdered Lourdes Gonzalez, a pregnant mother, in her E. 97th St. apartment as her three children huddled nearby.

“It’s one of the most sad examples of why we need protections,” Salaam said to Kenny and other police officials. “She could have been alive. Her husband could have appreciated the fact he still had a wife. Her children could have appreciated the fact that she’s still alive.”

Kenny agreed that wrongful convictions not only traumatize those behind bars but leave criminals free to victimize again.

Toward the end of the hearing, Salaam said he was treated worse by the media and the Manhattan district attorney’s office than by the police.

He said while there is still much work to be done — he is contacted regularly by convicts who said they never should have been arrested — it was “inspiring” to hear what efforts are being made to prevent a repeat of what happened to him and his friends.

“I applaud the effort that we’re trying to make sure we get it right,” Salaam said, “that we fix things that are really problematic.”