Experts Split on Prosecutors’ Decision Not to Charge Amy Cooper
Legal experts and commentators are divided on prosecutors’ decision last month to drop charges against Amy Cooper, a white woman who last summer called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black man. Ms. Cooper had been charged with filing a false police report after she and Mr. Cooper got into a dispute over her unleashed dog.
Some experts questioned the efficacy of harsh punishments for racially based false police reports. They also pointed out that while there are penalties for false reports to the police, there are no separate or additional penalties for those reports being racially based.
Other experts said a slew of racially based false complaints across the country recently indicates police should consider stronger punishments and do more to protect victims.
New York State has laws against hate crimes and the NYPD has a Hate Crime Task Force. However, racially based police reports are not documented and these crimes are a blind spot in law enforcement, according to Yazmine Nichols, lawyer and author of “Race Has Everything to Do with It: A Remedy for Frivolous Race-Based Police Calls.”
“The reason that New York State hate crime law fails to address race-based false reports is because FRBPCs (frivolous race based police calls) involve elements of false reporting crimes and hate crimes, placing the calls outside of traditional legal analysis,” wrote Nichols.
In a video that went viral last summer, Ms. Cooper called the police on Mr. Cooper, who had been bird-watching in Central Park, after he asked her to leash her dog. Ms. Cooper told police. “There’s an African American man. I am in Central Park. He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog.” In fact, as Mr. Cooper’s video of the event showed, he was doing no such thing.
Manhattan prosecutors on February 16 dropped the charges against Ms. Cooper, after she completed five therapy sessions which included racial bias training.
Jocelyn Simonson, a visiting law professor at Columbia Law School, said a harsher punishment for Ms. Cooper would have done little to solve larger issues tied to racism in the U.S.
“Punishing her doesn’t help us solve our broader collective problem of the connections between white supremacy and the function of the police in society,” Simonson said. “If we thought more broadly, then we could think about how we educate ourselves. We could think about whether we should have policing as we know it or have it at all.”
Yet other experts said a harsher punishment for these incidents would have been appropriate, but the punishment would have to depend on the crime.
In recent incidents that have been widely publicized online, white people have called the police on Black people all over the country for carrying out everyday activities, like waiting in a Starbucks, sleeping in a Yale University common area, and barbecuing in a public park.
During the incident last summer, many also reflected on historical examples of white women calling the police on Black men, such as the case of Emmett Till, a young boy was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after a white woman lied and said he whistled at her.
Mignon Moore, a sociology professor at Barnard College, said white women make these calls because they know the police will protect them.
“We know from the history of women’s experiences in the United States, that police and similar kinds of organizations see it as their duty to protect white women to keep them safe,” Moore said.
Mr. Cooper himself had not participated in the NYPD’s investigation into Ms. Cooper action’s. He said he was ambivalent about the charges Amy Cooper faced and that she had suffered enough from losing her job and reputation.
“Ultimately, I think that we have to respect the wishes of the victim here, Christian Cooper,” said Nichols, the lawyer. Still, she added, “there should also be some form of compensation to the victim.”
