The case, with bizarre and conflicting details as if from a Richard Price novel, has emerged to highlight, affirm and upend common biases surrounding urban poverty. A father and his teenage daughter were drinking together on a Thursday night, in the park; you can hear the refrain of good liberals telling themselves that this would never happen among the chess-playing families of Park Slope. Some of the suspects said the father and daughter were having sex, a claim one law enforcement official felt the need to point out would not mean that the woman “was not a victim of a pretty horrific attack.” What seemed to go unrecognized was that if the assertion turned out to be true, she would already have been horribly victimized.

Beyond that, two of the suspects were turned in by their mothers, women clearly unafraid of difficult lessons in consequence. The gesture provided an image strikingly different from what we received at the hands of Tonya Couch, known to the world as the affluenza mom, who was accused of helping her privileged son leave the country to avoid probation for killing four people in a drunken-driving accident.

Although the events that unfolded at the Osborn Playground on Jan. 7 are still unclear, what seems obvious, as it did in the case of Akai Gurley, mistakenly shot to death in a dark stairway in the Louis Pink Houses in East New York when a light bulb was out, is the inconsistency with which “broken windows” policing is practiced. The philosophy behind it is that safety and civility arise as a function of well-maintained public spaces, and yet, not surprisingly, it is the challenged neighborhoods that are the most poorly tended. Playgrounds in Brooklyn Heights, for example, are locked at night, precisely, one assumes, to protect the well-established from whatever might erupt if the ill-behaved were to congregate there.