Will New York let its long-professed collective guilt over the Central Park jogger case dictate public safety?
We’ll see if the City Council lets a perfectly proper police stop of onetime Central Park Five defendant Yusef Salaam, now a Harlem councilman, determine the future of policing.
In 1989, Manhattan prosecutors charged Salaam, then 15, in that spring’s rape and near-killing of the Central Park jogger.
He spent nearly seven years in prison.
In 2002, after a killer rapist confessed to the crime, a judge vacated the five defendants’ convictions.
The de Blasio administration later paid the five a $41 million settlement.
Last year, Salaam ran on his biography — and only that — to win a Harlem council seat.
Salaam hadn’t even lived in New York for six years and had no notion of running until Harlem Democrats recruited him.
With his advisers attuned to the polls — and aware Harlem voters aren’t “Defund the police” supporters — he ran as a moderate.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
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