Racist Dog Walker Charged For False Police Report On Black Bird Watcher
Reprinted with permission from DailyKos
Back in May, a former investment insurance manager at Franklin Templeton made headlines after a video of her wilding out on a Black bird watcher went viral. In the video, Amy Cooper went very bananas when asked to put her dog on a leash as she walked around an area of New York City's Central Park known as The Ramble. Cooper, who is white, went all out in the weird and dangerous racist department when she threatened to call (and then did call) 911 to report that Christian Cooper—a Black man—was "threatening her life."
In fact, she made sure to explain that she was going to very explicitly reference Christian Cooper's race when reporting this fake emergency. Now, ABC News reports that Amy Cooper has been charged with "falsely reporting an incident in the third degree." This was the only detail released by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance's office.
After the incident, Christian Cooper explained that while this kind of racism was not new to him or other Black people, he felt compelled to "stick [to] my guns and keep recording? I really kinda decided consciously, I'm not going to participate in my own dehumanization." Amy Cooper was promptly let go from her job, and issued an apology for her ugly and dangerous actions. Christian Cooper, who is a science editor and a New York City Audubon Society board member, accepted the apology, saying that "I think it's a first step. I think she's gotta do some reflection on what happened because up until the moment when she made that statement … it was just a conflict between a birder and a dog walker, and then she took it to a very dark place. I think she's gotta sort of examine why and how that happened."
