New York City is no place for sane Americans who just want to live their lives in peace.
As if the madness of the past month wasn’t enough of a warning sign for non-leftists to get out while they still can, consider the latest display of the Big Apple’s demented priorities, a Central Park altercation between Amy Cooper (who is white) and the unrelated Christian Cooper (who is black).
It seems Christian confronted Amy about her dog not being on a leash, and Amy responded by threatening to call the police and “tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” The whole sordid incident was caught on video back in May:
Oh, when Karens take a walk with their dogs off leash in the famous Bramble in NY’s Central Park, where it is clearly posted on signs that dogs MUST be leashed at all times, and someone like my brother (an avid birder) politely asks her to put her dog on the leash. pic.twitter.com/3YnzuATsDm
— Melody Cooper (@melodyMcooper) May 25, 2020
The next day, Amy issued a public apology:
I want to apologize to Chris Cooper for my actions when I encountered him in Central Park yesterday. 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.
When Chris began offering treats to my dog and confronted me in an area where there was no one else nearby and said, “You’re not going to like what I’m going to do next,” I assumed we were being threatened when all he had intended to do was record our encounter on his phone.
He had every right to request that I leash my dog in an area where it was required. I am well aware of the pain that misassumptions and insensitive statements about race cause and would never have imagined that I would be involved in the type of incident that occurred with Chris.
I hope that a few mortifying seconds in a lifetime of forty years will not define me in his eyes and that he will accept my sincere apology.
Christian accepted it (albeit while milking the publicity to push the broader “systemic racism” lie):
“I do accept her apology. It’s a first step. I think she’s got to do some reflection on what happened,” Cooper said on “The View” Thursday. “Up until the moment when she made that statement and made that phone call, it was just a conflict between a birder and a dog-walker. And then she took it to a very dark place, and I think she’s got to sort of examine why and how that happened.”
Cooper added that he wanted to “move it a little bit beyond her, because it’s not really about her and her poor judgment in a snap second. It’s about the underlying current of racism and racial perception that has been going on for centuries, and that permeates this city and this country that she tapped into.”
In a rational city (especially one that could muster a smidgen of empathy for the broader racial tensions boiling over at the time) , both parties settling a dispute among themselves like this would be the end of it. Not in New York, though, where over a month later, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is pressing charges.
“Today our Office initiated a prosecution of Amy Cooper for Falsely Reporting an Incident in the Third Degree,” Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. announced Monday. “Our office will provide the public with additional information as the case proceeds. At this time I would like to encourage anyone who has been the target of false reporting to contact our Office. We are strongly committed to holding perpetrators of this conduct accountable.”
For those keeping score, this would be the same Cy Vance who announced in June that his office would not be prosecuting “low-level” offenders arrested during the Black Lives Matter riots:
Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr. released a statement Friday, saying the DA’s Office is revising its policy regarding “arrests on charges of Unlawful Assembly and Disorderly Conduct during ongoing demonstrations against the use of excessive force and killing of George Floyd.”
Previously, it was the DA’s policy to “offer individuals charged with these low-level offenses an Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal, meaning their cases would be dismissed within six months,” according to the statement.
“Under the new policy, the DA’s Office declines to prosecute these arrests in the interest of justice,” the statement continued. “The Office will also continue to evaluate and decline to prosecute other protest-related charges where appropriate.”
That decision rightly angered many of New York’s finest at the time, resulting in the NYPD withdrawing its officers from the DA’s offices of several boroughs:
“It is a dereliction of duty to their oath of office,” Edward Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, told the Times. “More important than undercutting the work of the N.Y.P.D., it is undercutting public safety.”
Amen. It’s time to face facts, and the fact is that New York City is no longer the town Rudy Giuliani cleaned up twenty years ago. Public safety for all is out, and whether you can expect to enjoy the protections of the criminal justice system depends entirely on whether you align with the socio-cultural agenda of the powers that be.
And it’s only going to get worse from here. So to every conservative, Republican, or even moderate or apolitical New Yorkers who still live there, we send a simple question: what are you waiting for?
