A white woman who called the police and falsely accused a Black man of threatening her life after he asked her to put her dog on a leash will face misdemeanor charges, the Manhattan district attorney announced Monday.
Amy Cooper, the woman in the Central Park encounter, which was recorded on video and touched off intense discussions about the history of false reports to the police made by white people and directed at Black people, will be charged with filing a false report, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.
“Today our office initiated a prosecution of Amy Cooper for falsely reporting an incident in the third degree,” said Cyrus R. Vance, the Manhattan district attorney. “We are strongly committed to holding perpetrators of this conduct accountable.”
Ms. Cooper was issued a desk appearance ticket and will be arraigned on Oct. 14. If convicted, she could be given a conditional discharge or sentenced to community service or counseling rather than jail time.
On Memorial Day, Ms. Cooper who had been walking with her dog, encountered Christian Cooper, an avid bird watcher, in a semi-wild part of Central Park known as the Ramble, where dogs must be leashed.
Mr. Cooper asked Ms. Cooper, who is not related to him, to leash her dog, he said, and when she refused, he attempted to lure the dog with treats, to compel her to restrain her pet. The encounter then took a turn for the worse when Ms. Cooper told him she was going to call the police and tell them that an African-American man was threatening her life.
Mr. Cooper, who recorded the interaction on his phone, captured what happened next: “I’m in the Ramble, there is a man, African-American, he has a bicycle helmet and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog,” Ms. Cooper said hysterically to the 911 operator as she gripped her dog’s collar tightly.
Then, before hanging up, she said: “I am being threatened by a man in the Ramble, please send the cops immediately!”
“Thank you,” Mr. Cooper said after she put her dog on a leash, just before the video ends.
Mr. Cooper, 57, a Harvard graduate who works in communications, has long been a prominent birder in the city and is on the board of the New York City Audubon Society.
Shortly after video of the incident went viral, Ms. Cooper, surrendered her dog, Henry, to the cocker spaniel rescue group she had adopted him from two years before. She has since been reunited with the dog.
Ms. Cooper, who had been a head of insurance portfolio management at Franklin Templeton, was fired from her job.
She also issued a public apology and tried to explain her response.
“I reacted emotionally and made false assumptions about his intentions when, in fact, I was the one who was acting inappropriately by not having my dog on a leash,” Ms. Cooper said in the statement.
She added that when Mr. Cooper remarked that she would not like what he was “going to do next” and then offered her dog treats, she assumed he was threatening her. Mr. Cooper said at that point he had taken treats out to lure her dog, something he said most pet owners do not like and typically leads them to leash their dogs.
“I assumed we were being threatened when all he had intended to do was record our encounter on his phone,” Ms. Cooper said.
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