Are you surprised?
This is exactly how the Central Park 5 situation happened and not much has changed in appears from this story.
On Halloween night, a group of young teens and tweens from the Red Hook Houses were trick-or-treating in Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. The neighborhoods are a popular spot for a lot of children, and that means a lot of candy, said one 14-year-old who goes by the nickname Dibo.
That report would lead to three of Dibo’s friends, all black and one as young as 12, taken into police custody and handcuffed for hours without being able to talk to their parents. They were ultimately released after midnight with no robbery charges against them.
As Dibo and Anthony tell it, their group was crossing Court Street, a commercial drag, toward Cobble Hill Cinemas when multiple police cars rushed toward them from different directions, including at least one car being driven the wrong way. Dibo already had a bag heavy with candy while Anthony was just getting started on trick-or-treating, he said.
Two of the five boys stopped were Dibo and Anthony. Officers had them line up against the wall of the movie theater, where police searched them.
“They were yelling and their flashlights were all in our eyes,” Dibo said.
Anthony was then brought to the 76th Precinct station house, along with the other two boys, where he remained handcuffed to a bench for more than three hours.
Anthony’s mother, Tiffany Aloyo, said she never heard from police about her son’s whereabouts. She said she learned of her son’s arrest when Raymond called her.
When Aloyo got to the precinct, she said she was not allowed to see or talk to Anthony. She waited with the parents of the other two boys, neither of whom had been contacted by police at that point either, Aloyo said. Instead, the parents heard about the incident from the boys’ friends.
Aloyo said that when Anthony was released, police officers told her there were no charges. They left the precinct with no paperwork — no police report, no business card, no record of charges. Another parent, who did not want to be interviewed on the record, confirmed that he did not receive any documentation about the incident either.
Flip the page for video of the Central Park 5 to see how these type of things go down.