In some ways, Ken Burns documentary, “The Central Park Five, shows that our mothers were right. It does matter who you hang out with. If you’re with the wrong people at the wrong time, you can get into trouble. Add into the mix prejudices against economic and ethnic groups and you have five boys who get pushed through the legal system in a travesty of justice.

Directors/writers Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon mix TV broadcasts, headlines from local and national newspapers, archival footage, family photos and present-day interviews with the five and their family to make a scrapbook for New York City. Crime and violence had escalated with the introduction of crack cocaine into the city. The poor co-existed uneasily along side the white-collar workers, rubbing shoulders on the streets and subways. In 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four alleged muggers on the subway as an act of subway vigilantism. The documentary sets up the time and atmosphere for us before we get to the actual crime and trial.

Five boys were hanging out with the wrong crowd on April 19, 1989. Four of them were African-American. One was Latino. They joined a loosely-knit gang of roving young men in Central Park at night for what was later called wilding. The wilding included harassing and beating men who happened to be alone in the park at that time.

A woman jogging alone was attacked. She was white, had her B.A. from Wellesley College in economics and a master’s and an M.B.A. from Yale. She was an investment banker for Salomon Brothers.  Trisha Meili was not initially identified by the national and local press. Two ethnic-focused newspapers, The City Sun and the Amsterdam News, released her name. Meili herself came out in 2003, publishing a book, “I Am the Central Park Jogger.” She’s now a motivational speaker.

At the time of the incident, she was not expected to live, so severe was the beating. She was 28 and was found four hours after the attack. Her skull had been fractured and she was beaten so badly she could only be identified by a ring she wore. DNA evidence was available, but not used.

The five were Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam and Kharey Wise. All five were convicted in 1990 after two trials. They had confessed after being grilled for hours by detectives. This is Law & Order gone wrong. For those of us familiar with “Law & Order,”

The original series of “Law & Order” premiered Sept. 13, 1990. Creator Dick Wolf would develop this into a profitable franchise for NBC.  “Wilding” did become the topic for season 11, in 2001 in the episode “Sunday in the Park with Jorge.” Race was an  issue in this episode. The victim was white; the accused are Latino. It caused an uproar in the Puerto Rican community.

The real Central Park Five case also split the community between rich and poor, white and black, white and Latino.  To explain the situation, the directors looked to reporters such as Natalie Byfield of the Daily News and Jim Dwyer of the New York Times as well as historian Craig Steven Wilder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and social psychologist Saul Kassin of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in NYC and the Williams College in Massachusetts. Wilder wrote the 200 book “A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn.”  Kassin wrote a White Paper in 2010 called “Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations,” and has worked on the Innocence Project.

What this documentary details is a failure of the police department to follow procedure that procedural TV series like “Law & Order” have made so familiar, a failure of the D.A.’s office to look at the law and protect the people, a failure of the press to follow up on leads and even, the failure of one lonely juror to stick to his convictions. That juror (Harold Brueland), unlike Juror number 8 in “12 Angry Men,” caved in because, “I just went along with it at the end because frankly I was wiped out.”

Who you won’t see, except in archival news footage, are the prosecutors and the police officers. There may be reasons for that. Subtitles informed us that these people refused to cooperate. “The Central Park Five” premiered at Cannes this year. By Sept. 12, 2012, the attorneys for New York City subpoenaed the documentary production company for access to the original footage to use in the federal lawsuit brought by the five against the city for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination and emotional distress because they feel the documentary isn’t journalism, it is advocacy on behalf of the five. Only three of the five are involved in the lawsuit (Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Antron McCray).

So that final chapter hasn’t quite closed on the Central Park Five.

What I remember from the documentary, more than the public declarations, the high publicity stunts of politicians and self-promoters like Donald Trump (who took out a full page ad endorsing bringing back the death penalty), is the face of the only defendant who was sent to Rikers because he was charged as an adult. Wise’s face is so filled with sadness and suffering, that even the serial rapist Matias Reyes was moved to come forward 13 years after the crime and confess.

Sometimes it does matter who you hang out with. For five young men, hanging out with a crowd that went wilding changed their lives and stole their youth. They witnessed assaults on men, but did nothing. They caved into peer pressure and lied–confessing to please officers, thinking it would save them, but instead it damned them.   Our mothers and fathers were right about that.

If we want justice for ourselves and others, we must think for ourselves and be more skeptical and be willing to stand up against a tide of peer pressure.

“The Central Park Five” is currently playing at the Laemmle Playhouse 7.