Penalty
Franklin Templeton has now fired Amy Cooper.
“I don’t think there’s an African American person in America who hasn’t experienced something like this at some point,” Christian Cooper, a 57-year-old science editor, told The Washington Post in an interview. “I don’t shy away from confronting the scofflaw when I see it. Otherwise, the park would be unusable — not just to us birders but to anybody who enjoys the beauty.”
Christian Cooper — who is not related to Amy — had gotten up early on Memorial Day to head to the Ramble, a heavily wooded section of Central Park designed to resemble a wild garden. With its rocky outcrops and thick canopy, the area makes for an especially inviting stopover for birds on their northward migration, he said.
…
The novel coronavirus shut down the city this spring along with its busy dog runs. Authorities wanted to ensure pets’ humans were staying six feet apart, and the Ramble — already an occasional target for loose puppies — became a canine playground.
On a nearly daily basis, Cooper had seen unleashed pooches digging up the soil, ruining the delicate habitat and disturbing the birds. He had often asked unaware owners to restrain their pets, sometimes on camera, he said, and he carried around some dog treats for this very purpose. Monday morning was no different.
Around 7:30 a.m., he spotted rowdy, 2-year-old Henry grazing through the brush, as his human, an investment manager in yoga pants and a face mask, was standing right by a sign saying all dogs must be leashed.
He asked her to leash her dog, she refused, he started recording, she made a false report to the police. (I wonder if that will become a criminal matter. She’s admitted to doing it, and the police don’t look kindly on swatting.)
As of early Tuesday, the video had been viewed nearly 20 million times. Her employer, the investment firm Franklin Templeton, initially said it had placed her on administrative leave, but on Tuesday said that “[after?] our internal review of the incident in Central Park yesterday, we have made the decision to terminate the employee involved, effective immediately.”
She was never going to be good PR for them after this.
If you watch the video, she is also suspending the poor spaniel by his collar. The dog has since been returned to a rescue, which is good, because it looks like she has no business owning one.
I know, I said quite a lot about that in the first post on the subject.
She’s just a stupid woman who made an ass out of herself. Now her life is ruined.
At least she didn’t grab someone’s pussy and brag about it.
At least she didn’t attempt to rape someone and end up on the supreme court.
At least she didn’t knee on some black guy’s neck and kill him.
For that shit, you get off scot-free.
#2 Oops, I missed that post entirely. Now that I’ve read it, I can only agree with you. ;)
#3 Honesty, I’m more concerned about how she treated the poor dog than how she hurt some thin-skinned black guy’s feelings by being ignorant. Guess he showed her though. It’s not about the artificial nature park (oxymoron anyone?), it’s about race. How proud and brave and strong he must feel now.
Thin-skinned??? Hurt his feelings???? She tried to get him arrested! Which could easily have gotten him killed!
Did she do a Bad Thing? Sure. Is she probably a Bad Person? From the video, I’d guess yes. However, if you’re going to morally equate filing a false police report with attempted murder, you might want to stop and take a deep breath or six.
She’s ignorant, there were no grounds for arrest. He claims the confrontation was about the park, but this is not what caused the outrage. Of course she was in the wrong, about multiple things.
Who is morally equating filing a false police report with attempted murder? I’m not. I’m not even saying I think she’s a Bad Person – I think she could have had a very bad moment. But it’s extremely unlikely that she didn’t know about, for instance, Ahmaud Arbery. Calling the cops on black people can go horrifically wrong, especially if you say things like “He’s threatening me and my dog!” She has to have known that. She didn’t just “hurt his feelings”; she did something that could have gone very badly wrong for him.
But the thing is, after watching the video, it sure looks like he was the one who instigated the confrontation. I’m not sure who is supposed to enforce the leash law there, probably the police, but they could have been notified, and in fact there are probably several ways he could have handled it, but he did nothing to keep the situation from escalating. He was quick to video her and make sure he exposed her ignorance, but by that point it was no longer about the dog being off leash, the condition of the park, or anything other than race, and all because she identified him as African-American. She felt threatened, so that’s what she said, whether she was actually in a threatening situation is not clear, but being confronted at a park is probably not the most comfortable thing for a woman alone? In NYC?
twiliter, I don’t see anything wrong with asking someone to put their dog on the leash. As I indicated in the earlier post, this is a serious problem for people who are terrified of dogs, and for good reason. As for making it about race, he did not do that, she did. Maybe there were better ways to handle it, maybe not. But calling the police because some dude asks you to put your dog on a leash? Seriously?
It looks like she was attempting to do that, and not very adeptly, you can hear the dog yelping. Handling an unruly high energy dog is not easy. I think he had every right to ask her, but then hang around while she’s trying to get the dog under control and video her? I have asked people to please leash their dogs before, particularly when I don’t want their dog to approach mine while he’s on leash in an area where leashes are mandated, but I don’t force the issue, and if they don’t comply (they usually do), I tell them I will have to unleash him too so he can protect himself. She didn’t call the police because he asked her to leash the dog, she called because he hung around and started recording her. It sure looks like she felt threatened. She called him African-American, which is descriptive, but it turned into a race issue because of that?
I know the climate of police brutality and have seen the statistics on incarceration and the demographics, but I don’t think calling the police on a black person guarantees a bad outcome, although the odds are much higher that it does. He could have asked her, left her to get control of the dog, and went his merry way, but he didn’t. That’s what I would have done, and I’m not black but if I stayed looming over her and took out my phone to video her, I’m sure I would have been just as intimidating. That’s my guess anyway.
It seems to me perfectly reasonable for him to speak up and try to get her to put the dog on a leash. He has done this numerous times. The dog treats are a technique he found to work quite well, because people don’t like you interacting with their dog.
He told her “I’m going to do what I want, and I don’t think you’ll like it.” That’s a vague statement, and I can understand it being perceived as threatening, especially a woman being told that by a man. He could have phrased that better.
He videotaped part of the interaction. That’s simply prudent for a black man in today’s society. If she’s going to call the police, he’s going to want a record of the interaction. It could keep him out of jail or save his life.
She freaked out about being recorded, so it seemed to me. I don’t understand that. I also don’t understand why she insisted on calling the police. Why not put the dog on the leash, then call the police? She seemed extremely flustered and annoyed.
She was the one who brought race into the interaction. She told police repeatedly that she was being threatened by an African-American man. He was just telling her to leash her dog; Protecting the Park While Black. I agree with Ophelia, she has to have been aware of the recent history of incidents of calling the police on black people.
I do feel bad for her. She did something incredibly stupid, and her life got destroyed over it. I don’t think that was his intention or even hope; he was covering himself. It’s entirely too easy for people to lose their jobs over a single instance of stupidity in which no one was hurt. (That woman who was fired while on a long international flight, because of a racially insensitive tweet made right before the flight, keeps coming to mind.)
I wonder how the situation would have played out if she were male.
A couple of comments re #11
He was recording because she said she’d call the police. That’s the way it seemed to me. Not the other way around.
He was not “looming over her”. He repeatedly asked her to keep her distance, and she kept approaching him.
I don’t see her references to “African American man” as simply descriptive, but I also don’t think that’s what makes this a “race issue”. It’s a race issue because she is white and he is black and she called the police to report him. It would be great if race did not factor into different outcomes in that kind of situation, but it does. Her repeated references to his race (and nothing else other than his sex) sure make it seem like his race is his most prominent characteristic in her mind.
Of course, as soon as I’m done writing, and checking Facebook for the last time tonight, I see this article. It’s good, it connects a few things I hadn’t quite connected.
Amy Cooper Knew Exactly What She Was Doing
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/amy-cooper-knew-exactly-what-she-was-doing_n_5ecd1d89c5b6c1f281e0fbc5
He didn’t go about his business, he stayed to video her, I think that qualifies as looming. Then he posts it on twitter knowing what the reaction would be, and that’s malicious, he didn’t post it for anything good to come of it. He wasn’t being prudent, he was harrassing her. If someone doesn’t leave you be at a public park you have every incentive to call the police. Race aside, this is creepy behavior. As I said, she was in the wrong on several fronts, but he instigated the whole thing and he wasn’t being harmed by her or her dog. Asking someone to leash their dog is fine, hanging around and being confrontational is provocative and intimidating. He didn’t break any laws, but he was being a creep. It’s fine, I see the point being made and how calling the police on a black person is a threat in itself, but I think it could have been avoided, and I think he had an agenda, and not the one he said, which was to protect the park from the evil off leash dog owners. Well he sure showed her, didn’t he.
twiliter, the most important and telling thing that the Amy Cooper said was not the repeated description to the police of Christian Cooper being African American – that is information that the police would need (although it is likely that the police hadn’t yet asked for a description); it was when she told Cooper that she was going to phone the police and tell them that an African American man was threatening her and her dog. Why would she do that instead of saying ‘I’m going to phone the police and report you for threatening me’? I’m pretty sure that Mr. Cooper was well aware of his own skin colour. She did that because she was already aware of the way black people are disproportionately badly treated by the police compared to how they treat white people, and she sure as Hell knew that Mr. Cooper was aware of that, too.
She was letting him know that unless he stopped telling her to follow the law in the Ramble (and as Mr. Cooper is on the board of trustees or directors of the Ramble he would have every right to do so, just as a director of a swimming pool has the right to tell people not to shit un the pool) then she would call the police, lie about the confrontation, and make sure she brought race into it. The message was very clear; it was ‘Even if the police don’t over-react with violence, we both know that they are more likely to believe a white, middle-class woman’s lies than the truth from a black man’.
The way she changed her tone when talking to the police, the switch from her entitled belligerence towards Mr. Cooper to the ‘helpless frightened woman in distress’ act just confirmed that she wanted the police to punish him for forgetting his place.
Does anybody think that Ms. Cooper would have acted the same had Mr. Ccooper been a white, middle-class man asking her to leash her dog as per the law? If yes, I have a bag of magic beans to sell you.
Yes, so how much for those beans? ;) I don’t think she would have used the added threat of racial discrimination by the police, but yes, I think she would have had a similar reaction. Creepy white dudes are no less intimidating when they don’t leave you alone in a park, and calling the police on them is a good idea. Requesting she leash her dog is one thing, hanging around and taking videos is another. And if he had some kind of authority to enforce park rules, how would she know that? There are some details of the story missing. It would have been a non-story without the racial component, and even in the Audubon statement there is no mention of leashing dogs or protecting the park, it’s all about a white woman retaliating in a foul way. He wasn’t in any danger from her and she wasn’t making the park unsafe for black people, that’s absurd. I think she probably just wanted to be left alone. Well, I’m repeating myself now, so I’ll have to agree to disagree. Don’t worry though, he has plenty of people defending him so I’ll let it rest.
I really don’t know what some of you were seeing.
I saw a belligerent woman moving aggressively toward a man who was recording her. She was dangling the dog by the collar and paying attention to her need to make the man stop recording her. The dog was a bit rambunctious because of the way she was dragging it around. Makes me wonder how energetic and uncontrolled the dog was off the leash. The man asked her to keep her distance. She threatened to call the police with a trumped up accusation: she intended to tell the cops that a black man was threatening her and her dog. That was an outright lie. She was threatening him, not the other way around. She had trouble controlling the dog and handling her phone at the same time. That wouldn’t have been a problem if she had the dog on a leash. She escalated her volume and the drama when the 911 dispatcher wasn’t responding quickly enough or with sufficient solicitousness and zeal. What I saw looked entirely like a malicious racist effort to get the police to retaliate against him for having the temerity to confront her about the leashing regulations.
Okay, just one more thing. This has several facets, and I think twiliter made some good points in the last post which were not as clear in earlier posts. Yes, the woman behaved badly toward both man and dog. Yes, she brought race into it, and should not have called the police. And yes, I think she behaved abominably. But….the point that women do have a lot to fear from unknown men (whatever race) that approach them is real.
I don’t think that was what was going on here; it does reek of white middle-class privilege, and having your dog off the leash in public is an act of aggression in itself, as dogs can be dangerous. Even if there is no one in the park, you have no idea that will remain the case, and you need to leash your dog. Telling the man to back off would have convinced me that she was worried about the idea of a strange man, but she didn’t do that, she approached him. So yes, twiliter is right that we should be aware of the danger of men approaching women in parks, but again, this doesn’t appear to be the case here…if it were, she would have been the one telling him to stay back.
So it’s complicated, but I do think it swings down to she was in the wrong. That being said, the penalty was…shocking. This is much stricter than what I have ever seen happen to a man who actually abuses a woman in the workplace. There will be hearings, tut tuttings, questionings of the woman, accusations of her being complicit, liking it, or asking for it, and finally a reprimand (sometimes, but not often), possibly a warning, and in next to worst case scenarios, sensitivity training. And the woman will become a pariah for having spoken out.
I think administrative leave, coupled with sensitivity training, would have been more appropriate. A pubic apology, yes. But not enough. Losing her job – too much. (It was different when it was Rush Limbaugh; he has a long, documented on the radio history of deliberately provocative behavior, and they should have known better than to hire him as a sportscaster to begin with). In the absence of other incidents, losing her job was extreme. It is possible this has been an ongoing problem, and if so, that would not have been revealed to us by the company unless absolutely necessary to release those details in a court case, because personnel records are private.
I don’t think she was acting out of fear, but out of some sense of outraged entitlement at being told to leash her dog. She brought race into the issue, and behaved despicably. But men do need to be aware of the heightened threat a woman might feel when approached by an unknown man. So I think twiliter is right on some counts, and everyone else is right on others.
Wait a second though, twiliter’s claim is that Cooper was needlessly “hanging around” and thus appearing threatening to her, but that leaves out the core of the issue: he was there to birdwatch. He probably had binoculars around his neck. Birdwatching isn’t about keeping moving, it’s about staying still and watching. Much of the reason there are signs telling people to keep their dogs on leash in the Ramble is because it’s a bird stopover place, and designed and maintained as such by the parks people. The rest of the reason is because it has special plantings, there to attract birds, which dogs like to dig up and destroy. C. Cooper wasn’t hanging around to intimidate A. Cooper, he was hanging around to watch birds. He was using the Ramble for its intended purpose, while she was using it to let her dog bounce around, which is destructive of its intended purpose.
I agree that losing her job is overkill, but I also get that Franklin Templeton will be seeing her as a PR nightmare, and in a situation like that financial firms aren’t particularly concerned with fairness.
Yeah, that’s why I said that twiliter was only partially right. She makes an important point, but I don’t think it’s the relevant point in this case.
And I’m sorry but the tone of some of this shit really pisses me off, because it’s the kind of shit we do hear from Trump and trumpies and vigilantes in gated communities interrogating delivery drivers who have the bad taste to be black wtf they’re doing in the gated community. It’s ugly entitled racist shit and it’s part of the mental world that gets people like Ahmaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin killed dead by vigilantes and people like George Floyd killed dead by cops who kneel on their necks for 7 minutes while bystanders yell at them to stop. All this hostile suspicion of what Christian Cooper had the audacity to be doing in the Ramble that morning when we already know he was there to watch birds and that he’s a science editor and on the board of the Audubon Society. HE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG.
I realize this is a minor point in this context, but in addition to everything Ophelia notes, this is also an example of the entitlement of some dog owners. I get it, they need their exercise, and in a lot of places there aren’t adequate spaces for them, but if you don’t have access to adequate spaces for dogs to exercise you really should rethink your need to have a dog. And public parks generally are not there for dog exercising.
Yes that too.
(Sorry, iknklast, my @22 wasn’t in reply to your @21, I was typing when you posted it; it was an addition to my @20.)