In the Ramble
I watched this unfolding on Twitter yesterday afternoon and didn’t post about it because…skatey-eight million people already were posting about it, and some of the facts were unclear at the time. But given the lynching “in effigy” of the governor of Kentucky on Sunday, and the death by cop of yet another black guy in Minneapolis last night, and the facts that have been clarified by now – there are things worth saying.
The tweet that everyone was talking about yesterday:
An interaction between a black male birder and a white woman walking her dog in Central Park early Monday morning went viral after the woman called the police on the man when he admonished her for disobeying park rules by allowing her dog off the leash in a protected area of the park. Christian Cooper posted a video he took of the Memorial Day interaction that occurred in an interior, wooded portion of Central Park known as the Ramble that is popular with birders. Cooper came across the woman walking her dog between 7:30 and 8 a.m. and pointed out to her that unleashed dogs are not allowed in area, before asking her to put her dog on a leash. When the woman refused, Cooper says he took a dog treat out of his pocket that he carries for just such occasions with recalcitrant dog owners, and gave it to the dog. He then took out his phone and started recording.
The video begins with the woman, later identified as Amy Cooper (no relation), standing some 30 feet away. She takes her dog by the collar and then begins approaching Christian Cooper with her arm up as if to cover the phone lens asking him to stop videoing her. When he calmly refuses, asking her “please don’t come close to me,” presumably for social distancing reasons, she threatened to call the police. “Please call the cops,” he said in response. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” she replied. “Please tell them whatever you like,” he said.
The description is carefully journalistically neutral; watching the clip is more visceral. Amy Cooper’s approaching the man feels more aggressive than that narrative conveys, because of the pandemic. Without the pandemic it might feel just bizarre, but with it it feels belligerent, like those stories of people who spit or cough at store clerks who say masks are required. Normally it seems silly to call a woman rushing up to a man “aggressive,” but these times are not normal.
Amy Cooper then calls the police on her cellphone, telling them, “I’m sorry, I’m in the Ramble. There’s a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet. He is recording me and threatening me and my dog.” Christian Cooper, who is standing on a footpath, doesn’t move and continues to record. “I’m being threatened by a man in the Ramble, please send the cops immediately!” the woman says in an increasingly distraught voice. While she’s on the phone with police, she clicks the leash back on her dog. “Thank you,” Christian Cooper says in response to her leashing her dog, as he lowers his phone and stops recording.
And while that sequence of events is going on Amy Cooper is also holding her poor dog by his collar while standing up straight, and since he’s a cocker spaniel this means she is holding him off his front paws by the collar and strangling him. The suffocating dog is struggling desperately the whole time while Amy Cooper is too busy with her phone to notice; it’s horrible to watch. The racism is the serious issue but the casual strangling is brutal too.
The New York Police Department said when officers responded to the call neither Amy Cooper nor Christian Cooper [was] at the scene. The NYPD said no arrests were made and no complaint was filed for what was determined to be a “verbal dispute.”
That was the main thing that was unclear yesterday as far as I knew. I saw one claim that the police never showed up, so I wondered if Amy Cooper could possibly have pretended to make the call, but I didn’t feel like seeming to want to exonerate her by suggesting it, so I left it alone. (Who cares? Well there’s the whole issue of social media pile-ons, and it is a real issue. On the other hand racist murder by cop is a far bigger issue.)
Christian Cooper is a serious birder. He explains why dogs really have to be on leash in the Ramble.
Christian Cooper explained in interviews afterward that his chief concern was protecting the bird habitat in the park, which he described as “a major birding hotspot. It’s on the Atlantic flyway.” “That’s important to us birders because we know that dogs won’t be off leash at all and we can go there to see the ground-dwelling birds,” Christian Cooper told CNN. “People spend a lot of money and time planting in those areas as well. Nothing grows in a dog run for a reason.”
He carries dog treats as a last resort, because people don’t like seeing strangers feed their dogs so on goes the leash at last.
Amy Cooper, however, responded far differently, threatening not just to call the cops, but using the birder’s race as an implicit trumped-up threat when requesting a police response to being asked to follow the rules and then being recorded for not doing so. “I videotaped it because I thought it was important to document things,” Christian Cooper said. “Unfortunately we live in an era with things like Ahmaud Arbery, where black men are seen as targets. This woman thought she could exploit that to her advantage, and I wasn’t having it.”
And now her life is a mess; social media yadda yadda. But what if the cops had arrived swiftly? What if they’d arrested Christian Cooper? (Let alone killed him, which is not as far-fetched as it should be.) What if Amy Cooper had strolled home happy with her morning’s work? Would that be a better outcome?
Hardly. Social media pile-ons are a bad thing, but calling the cops on a black guy while claiming non-existent violence is much much worse.
Her employer has put her on administrative leave, and her dog is back with the spaniel rescue organization she adopted him from.
There is a real phone number to call now, 1-844-WYT-FEAR, published today in the New York Times. There is also an email address to report these incidences of (pretty much always) white people calling the police on black people being alive. If one can’t access the piece, here is the YouTube version of the video.
Whoops! That was originally published in 2018, and republished today online in the NYT. Sorry for missing that.
What’s so striking about this is that she specifically says that she’s going to tell the cops it’s an African-American man “threatening” her. I mean, those racial dynamics would have been there even if she hadn’t said so, but she doesn’t even have the excuse of “I wasn’t thinking about that.” She was deliberately weaponizing a black man’s (legitimate) concerns about police. Whether she meant to convey “and they might shoot or beat you up” or “only” to imply “and they’re gonna believe me and not you” is debateable but it’s gross either way.
I’m also a little curious as to whether her increasing agitation on the call with the police was pure acting on her part, or genuine frustration that her tactic wasn’t getting the response (from either the cops or the birder) that she’d hoped. I tend to suspect the latter — this woman fancies herself a dog lover, and I don’t think she’d be quite so oblivious to the dog’s plight if she weren’t genuinely emotionally riled up.
As to the social media pile-on, I’m a little less concerned about these things. It’s true that the reaction is often disproportionate to the misdeed, but I’m not sure what can be done about it. Should we just not comment on an incident like this? That seems wrong — I think these types of incidents are very helpful in helping people (mainly clueless white people, which I definitely was and still am on occasion) appreciate the reality of minorities. And I don’t see a logical stopping point in terms of quantity: like, the first X bloggers and Y retweeters are ok, but after that is bad. (Obviously, anybody who is sending Amy Cooper death threats is out of line, but that ought to go without saying.) Should she lose her job over this? I don’t know. I think companies are often too quick to fire controversial people, but on the other hand, I try to imagine being a racial minority who was her subordinate — am I really confident that she is going to evaluate me fairly?
The only “solution” I have is that we collectively should be a little better at eventually forgiving instances where someone had one bad moment, one dumb joke, etc., provided they made some decent efforts at acknowledging their failure. Like, I wouldn’t bear a grudge against that PR rep who made a bad joke about AIDS in Africa — it’s one bad moment, it was years ago, she paid a price, fine. I wouldn’t hold it against her if I was considering hiring her for something. (Conversely, I think society — or at least certain pockets of it — are often TOO eager to forgive someone who has demonstrated persistent unethical behavior. I’m thinking of frauds like Stephen Glass and Jonah Lehrer, who keep getting offered more chances, I suppose because they’re charming or went to the right schools or whatever.)
I struggle with the same questions. I think the core idea is that once a dogpile gets going, latecomers should refrain from adding to it. I also think that has some merit, but…it’s complicated. Latecomers don’t necessarily know it’s a dogpile, and it depends on what kind of issue it is. No doubt Amy Cooper is having a very bad time right now, but on the other hand a lot of other people are seeing an object lesson.
Or what about those guys doing the lynching in effigy yesterday? Do I have any qualms about maybe adding to a dogpile by posting about them? Oh hell no. Then again I suspect they’re a lot less susceptible to shame than Amy Cooper is likely to be. (Why? Different social circles, mostly. Also different sex. “Karen” or not, I think it’s easier for men to have bronze hides.)
I have struggled repeatedly with unleashed dogs; it’s one reason I don’t walk in my neighborhood without my husband, because people don’t follow leash laws very well here, and the cops don’t enforce it very well (unless said dog is a pit bull). I have been subjected to attack by a dog when I was a child, and am terrified of big dogs, at least other people’s dogs. I don’t like to own any dog larger than, say, an Irish terrier (my current dog), and don’t want big dogs bounding up to me to be petted, to growl at me, or for any other reason. Some people get really offended when you ask them to control their dog, and some of the people are scarier than the dogs.
So, yeah, birds…same reason my cats are indoor cats. But also people, because fear of dogs can drive people inside when we need a place to walk and enjoy life, and it isn’t us being weak, wimps, or losers, it is a genuine fear for a real reason. Dogs can do serous damage to people, and I have no way of knowing if a particular unknown dog is friendly or hostile.
And that woman’s reaction is sheer ugliness. Leash your dog, damn it, and don’t think you get to call the police just because someone who looks different than you asks you politely to do the right thing and follow the law.
@Screechy Monkey After watching the video, my read on the situation is that Amy’s agitation was genuine, because she (racistly) views black men as threatening. Her fear was genuine (but unjustified). Maybe there was a sprinkling of legitimate nervousness at being a woman approached by a man in an isolated area. I think she specified “African American” not as a conscious threat – it was less “…and the police will view you as suspect because you’re black” as much as “I and the police both view you as suspect because you’re black”. I’d also like to think that someone wouldn’t choke their dog like that unless they were so panicked that they weren’t thinking straight.
I don’t think it really makes a difference – in either case, a black man going about his day got the police called on him because he was black.
I missed that you made the same observation about the dog being choked. I still think it’s more likely to have been pure, unjustified panic rather than frustration at the situation not going her way.
She doesn’t seem panicked though, she seems pissed off. If she were panicked would she rush toward him? She seems peeved that somebody is telling her to leash her dog. I’m familiar with the type.
It’s a good point–I would have thought if she were really afraid she’d have made as dignified a getaway as she could–nothing was stopping her. I think I’d have leashed the dog and moved as fast as I could toward somewhere where I was likely to see other people. What actually seems to have been upsetting her was him recording her behaviour.
I know you’re not a massive Popehat fan, but yesterday when I was reading about this event this tweet did strike a chord with me.
Also, Amy Cooper was definitely angry and frustrated, not panicked IMO.
Yeah, you’re all probably right. To me her voice sounded more upset than angry, but it could also be frustrated as well.
Rob, it’s not that I’m not a Popehat fan, it’s that I think he shouldn’t have (abruptly) blocked me on Twitter. I still think he says good stuff.
I definitely got the vibe that she was putting something on when she was on the phone with the cops. The guy was clearly not threatening anyone. He wasn’t even moving. This seemed almost like a swatting to me, where you orchestrate something to get the cops or a SWAT team to show up at someone’s house. And if the cops had shown up to stop a violent, threatening black man (!), who knows what could have happened?
About the dogpiling: I view the problem not so much as people thinking they’re entitled to announce their opinion of rude or offensive strangers’ behavior as people thinking they’re entitled to get people fired, ostracized, etc.
Indeed – I saw people calling it swatting yesterday.
I’ve thought of another reason one has an impulse to add to the “pile-on”: it’s to support the person the bad behavior was done to. It would be crappy if this incident were just a ho-hum no biggy slice of life in New York and no one cared. That gets called “virtue-signaling” a lot but I’ve always had reservations about the phrase, and this is why. Maybe some of it is virtue-signaling, who knows, but surely some of it is also solidarity-signaling and/or let’s all stop doing shit like that signaling. Even virtue-signaling itself isn’t necessarily all bad or about ego-puffing: it can be about trying to signal each other to do better.