Amy Cooper did not get what she deserved
Amy Cooper is now a household name. What she isn’t is a convicted criminal. That’s the difference between social media notoriety and accountability before the law. The laws have to change so that threats of racial terrorism-by-cop are treated like the hate crimes they are.
Early on Memorial Day morning, Ms. Cooper, a white woman who until recently worked in corporate finance, threatened Christian Cooper (no relation), a former editor at Marvel Comics and one of the few black members of New York’s Audubon Society, for complaining about her unleashed dog in a part of Central Park reserved for avid bird watchers like him. All he asked was that she obey the law as posted on the park’s many signs and leash her dog.
For that, Ms. Cooper was incensed. Gesticulating wildly while choking her squealing cocker spaniel by its collar several inches above the ground, she invaded Mr. Cooper’s space. He politely asked that she keep her distance, while filming her on his phone.
At this point, Ms. Cooper committed what should be universally recognized as a racial bias crime. She threatened to sic the NYPD on Mr. Cooper. The threat was explicit: “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” she said.
Her intention was to use Mr. Cooper’s blackness as a weapon against him. She knew as a matter of practical policing that when the cops eventually arrived, they would be predisposed to believe her side of the dispute.
Her intention was to hurt Mr. Cooper or, at the very least, inconvenience him with a trip to the precinct house. If he got a little roughed up in the process, well, that would teach him to lecture her about annoying leash laws.
During her conversation with the dispatcher, she ratcheted-up the panic in her voice after emphasizing she and her dog were being threatened by an African American male in the Ramble. “Please send the cops immediately,” she said after describing him again. Her ability to effect a terror she didn’t really feel was Oscar-worthy.
Christian Cooper thanked Amy Cooper for the unobstructed peek into an aspect of American lynching protocol as old as the republic itself. The manufacturing of evidence that could send a person of color into the clutches of the criminal justice system for disrespecting a white woman had simply never been caught on camera before, but we always knew it was there.
Being an astute observer of nature and people, Mr. Cooper quickly exited the Ramble with his evidence before the cops could arrive. Ms. Cooper left before the cops arrived.
Little did she suspect that Mr. Cooper’s video would be seen by hundreds of thousands of people online by the end of the day and ultimately cost her her job.
“My life is being destroyed,” Ms. Cooper whined after she was outed on social media. Even her dog was reclaimed by the animal rescue league. She lost whatever good reputation she might’ve accrued over the years, but she didn’t lose her freedom.
On the contrary, despite being right by the law by asking Ms. Cooper to leash her dog, Mr. Cooper could’ve potentially lost everything, including his life, had he remained in the park. Imagine what might have happened if a police officer of the caliber of the four who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis later that day had answered the call and surrounded Mr. Cooper in the Ramble. There is currently no law that punishes a civilian for summoning the police for a frivolous reason that could result in the death of a law-abiding citizen.
Suppose the responding officers for reasons of bias and race hatred had been as incensed by the dispatcher’s report of a “black man threatening a woman and her dog” as the four cops were by the report of a “forger” on the loose in the Twin Cities?
What would someone like Officer Derek Chauvin, the policeman who applied the full weight of his knee to Mr. Floyd’s neck for eight minutes, have done to a black bird watcher? Is there any reason to believe he would’ve gotten a glimpse of Mr. Cooper’s humanity when he wasn’t able to see Mr. Floyd’s? What kind of human hears a man begging for his next breath and not accommodate him, especially after he’s been handcuffed? What kind of police officers look on with indifference despite the sound of suffering coming from someone merely suspected of trying to pay with a counterfeit $20 bill? What does it mean when sadism is indistinguishable from ordinary police work these days?
When Amy Cooper was initially fired by her company Franklin Templeton, there was some initial social media tut-tutting that “shame culture” and “virtue signaling” had claimed another scalp and that what she did wasn’t that serious since no one had died. That’s asinine!
The fact that she’s sorry doesn’t mitigate the very real danger she exposed Mr. Cooper to that morning. Despite being a white lady,
Ms. Cooper had no quality control powers over the cops who would’ve rushed to the park to protect her virtue that morning. New York is the same town where the majority of police officers believe the strangulation killing of Eric Garner by cops on Staten Island in 2014 was justified at the time, despite the use of an illegal chokehold. Don’t forget that Mr. Garner’s crime was allegedly selling loose cigarettes.
Rather than tempt fate, Mr. Cooper left the park early rather than deal with the unknown that comes with cops and vengeful civilians projecting their brokenness and lack of empathy unto others. That was the smartest thing he could have possibly done. There is nothing to be gained by a random encounter with the police after a white woman makes a call like Ms. Cooper did. That script has only had one ending in hundreds of years of American history.
Meanwhile, the sooner all 50 states have laws on the books that criminalize what Ms. Cooper did on Memorial Day, the sooner black citizens and other people of color will be able to exhale in the presence of cops. Not all cops are bad, of course, but there aren’t enough good cops self-policing their own ranks to matter. The public is finally in the mood to push for better bias laws and prosecutors willing to enforce them.