THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTHURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020 Y A23
Amy Cooper, the white woman
who called the police on a Black
bird-watcher in Central Park,
made a second, previously unre-
ported call to 911 in which she
falsely claimed that the man tried
to assault her, a prosecutor said on
Wednesday.
“The defendant twice reported
that an African-American man
was putting her in danger, first by
stating that he was threatening
her and her dog, then making a
second call indicating that he tried
to assault her in the Ramble area
of the park,” Joan Illuzzi, a senior
prosecutor, said.
The second call was disclosed
as Ms. Cooper appeared remotely
in Manhattan Criminal Court to
answer a misdemeanor charge of
filing a false police report, which
carries a maximum sentence of a
year in jail.
Ms. Cooper had been charged in
July, and no additional charges
were announced on Wednesday.
Ms. Illuzzi said the Manhattan dis-
trict attorney’s office was negoti-
ating a possible plea deal with Ms.
Cooper that would allow her to
avoid jail.
The hearing was the latest de-
velopment in the Memorial Day
weekend encounter that res-
onated across the country and re-
ignited discussions about every-
day racism confronting Black peo-
ple and the danger they face when
false accusations are made to the
police.
Ms. Cooper was filmed calling
911 from an isolated area of Cen-
tral Park after a Black man asked
her to leash her dog, as the rules
required. During the first call, she
said multiple times that an “Afri-
can-American man” was threat-
ening her, emphasizing his race to
the operator as she raised her
voice frantically.
Cellphone video of the encoun-
ter shot by the man, Christian
Cooper, has been viewed nearly 45
million times. Its timing, one day
before protests erupted nation-
wide over the police killing of
George Floyd in Minneapolis,
only deepened the outrage over
the issue of everyday racism. (Ms.
Cooper is not related to Mr. Coo-
per.)
But prosecutors said Ms. Coo-
per made a later call to 911, which
was not shown in the video. In that
call, Ms. Cooper told the dis-
patcher that Mr. Cooper had tried
to assault her, according to a crim-
inal complaint.
When the police arrived, how-
ever, Ms. Cooper told an officer
that her reports were untrue, and
that Mr. Cooper had not touched
or assaulted her, the complaint
said.
The criminal complaint men-
tioned two calls, but charged her
with only one count.
Ms. Illuzzi told the court that
Ms. Cooper had used the police in
a way that was “both racially of-
fensive and designed to intimi-
date” and that her actions were
“something that can’t be ignored.”
Still, the prosecutor said the dis-
trict attorney’s office was explor-
ing a resolution to the case that
would require Ms. Cooper to take
responsibility for her actions in
court and attend a program to ed-
ucate her on how harmful they
were.
“We hope this process will en-
lighten, heal and prevent similar
harm to our community in the fu-
ture,” Ms. Illuzzi said.
Judge Nicholas Moyne ad-
journed the case until Nov. 17 to
give Ms. Cooper’s lawyer, Robert
Barnes, and prosecutors time to
work out an agreement.
“We will hold people who make
false and racist 911 calls account-
able,” the Manhattan district at-
torney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said in
a statement on Wednesday. “For-
tunately, no one was injured or
killed in the police response to Ms.
Cooper’s hoax.”
Mr. Barnes said in July that Ms.
Cooper would be found not guilty
if the case went to trial and criti-
cized what he called a “cancel cul-
ture epidemic.”
“How many lives are we going
to destroy over misunderstood,
60-second videos on social me-
dia?” he asked. He declined to
comment on Wednesday.
Mr. Vance’s decision to charge
Ms. Cooper drew mixed reactions
from Black community leaders
and proponents of overhauling
the criminal justice system. He
also did not have the support of
Mr. Cooper, who has long been a
prominent birder in the city and
sits on the board of the New York
City Audubon Society.
As the episode gained wide-spread attention across the coun-
try, Ms. Cooper, who had been a
head of insurance portfolio man-
agement at Franklin Templeton,
lost her job and was publicly
shamed. She also surrendered her
dog temporarily to the rescue
group from which she had
adopted it.
At the time, Mr. Cooper, a 57-
year-old Harvard graduate who
works in communications, said
the consequences and public
backlash she had faced were al-
ready enough. He did not cooper-
ate with the prosecution’s investi-
gation and said in a statement in
July that “bringing her more mi-
sery just seems like piling on.”
In an interview on Wednesday,
Mr. Cooper declined to answer
specific questions about the sec-
ond 911 call or about Ms. Cooper’s
potential plea deal. The encounter
in Central Park was “not about
Amy Cooper,” he said, but about a
larger societal problem.
“My response is very simple:
We have to make sure we don’t get
distracted,” Mr. Cooper said. “We
have a very important goal — and
we have to stay focused on it —
which is reforming policing, get-
ting systemic change to the struc-
tural racism in our society.”
Weeks after the confrontation,
New York State lawmakers ap-
proved legislation entitling people
to “a private right of action” if theybelieved that someone called the
police on them because of their
race, gender, nationality or any
other protected class. The move
was a direct response to the Cen-
tral Park run-in and other false re-
ports to the police about Black
people.
The clash between Mr. Cooper
and Ms. Cooper began as he biked
to search for birds in a semi-wild
section of the park known as the
Ramble, where dogs must be
leashed. He encountered Ms. Coo-
per, walking with an unleashed
dog, and said in a Facebook post
that she refused to put a leash on
the dog when asked.
He wrote that he offered the dog
treats in an effort to persuade Ms.
Cooper to follow the area’s rules.
Then, video captures her calling
911 and telling an operator, “I’m in
the Ramble, there is a man, Afri-
can-American. He has a bicycle
helmet and he is recording me and
threatening me and my dog.”
One day after the incident, Ms.
Cooper issued a public apology.
“I reacted emotionally and
made false assumptions about his
intentions when, in fact, I was the
one who was acting inappropri-
ately by not having my dog on a
leash,” Ms. Cooper said in the
statement. “I am well aware of the
pain that misassumptions and in-
sensitive statements about race
cause.”Woman Made 2nd Call on Black Bird-Watcher
By TROY CLOSSONCHRISTIAN COOPER, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSAmy Cooper faces a misde-
meanor charge of filing a false
police report against Christian
Cooper, who recorded the Me-
morial Day weekend con-
frontation on his cellphone.BRITTAINY NEWMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMESSarah Maslin Nir and Jan Ransom
contributed reporting.
Federal authorities in New York
have traditionally touted big orga-
nized crime and drug-trafficking
cases, using powerful racket-
eering laws to arrest kingpins and
dismantle criminal enterprises
that drive violence.
But the acting United States at-
torney in Brooklyn, Seth
DuCharme, announced on
Wednesday that his office will also
now focus on lower-level gun
cases that were once the bailiwick
of local district attorneys.
The new initiative is part of a
broader pattern as federal offi-
cials in New York City step in to
respond to growing pressure to
curb the sharp rise in gun violence
this year.
The effort thrusts Brooklyn into
the national debate about the role
of law enforcement during a peri-
od of heightened tensions be-
tween federal and local authori-
ties in cities that have seen an up-
tick in shootings. President
Trump has seized on the rise in vi-
olent crime to make urban unrest
a centerpiece of his re-election
campaign, labeling cities like New
York as “anarchist jurisdictions.”
A special team of federal pros-
ecutors in Brooklyn will now take
more gun cases from state pros-
ecutors, meaning those defend-
ants will face higher prison sen-
tences and a higher likelihood of
being held in jail before trial.
“What’s perfectly obvious to ev-
eryone right now is New York is
not as safe as it could be or once
was,” Mr. DuCharme said in an in-
terview.
After a period of historically low
crime, shootings in New York City
have nearly doubled in the first
nine months of this year com-
pared with the same period last
year, according to the police. Mur-
ders are up nearly 40 percent over
the same period. Many of those
killed have not been targets but
bystanders, including a 1-year-old
boy who was shot in his stroller in
Brooklyn.
About one-third of the 100 pros-
ecutors in Mr. DuCharme’s office,
also known as the Eastern District
of New York, will now take on vio-
lent crime cases in some capacity.
The office has jurisdiction over
Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island
and Long Island.
Last month, Attorney General
William P. Barr threatened to
withhold federal funding from
New York, criticizing the city’s
elected district attorneys for de-
clining to bring charges related to
the protests after George Floyd’s
killing and accusing them of being
soft on crime.
The district attorneys were no-
ticeably absent from the news
conference on Wednesday an-
nouncing the new initiative, which
was attended by several other law
enforcement agencies.
Mr. DuCharme said he was
closely coordinating with the dis-
trict attorneys and believed they
“sincerely want to make the city
as safe as they can,” but were lim-
ited in their ability to do so.
Defense lawyers warned that
an increase in federal intervention
would lead to unequal treatment
for certain defendants, the vast
majority of whom are Black or
Hispanic. Those defendants’
cases could now have widely dis-
parate outcomes depending on
which office handles their arrest.
“These ongoing efforts to feder-
alize local crimes accomplish
nothing more than securing the
removal of individuals from their
communities and undermining
the stability of those communi-
ties,” said Amanda David, a fed-
eral defender in Brooklyn.
Federal prosecutors have long
been involved in charging street
crimes, especially complex mob
or gang cases that can require
years of wiretaps and undercover
work. But the new initiative
means more run-of-the-mill gun
cases will now be handled in fed-
eral court, potentially diverting
resources away from other areas,
such as public corruption and
white-collar crime.
To justify the use of federal re-
sources, Mr. DuCharme said his
office would identify cases with
aggravating factors, such as de-
fendants with gang affiliations or
a history of violent conduct.
The closer collaboration be-
tween the New York Police De-partment and federal authorities
comes as the department is facing
its own turbulence in the wake of
civil unrest over police brutality
and cuts to its budget.
The number of gun arrests
plummeted this summer, prompt-
ing accusations by local leaders
that police officers were intention-
ally slowing down response times
as a reaction to recent reforms.
N.Y.P.D. officials have said the
drop occurred because the force
was stretched thin by the need to
redeploy officers to cover pro-
tests.
The police unions have clashed
in particular with Mr. DuCharme’s
local counterpart, Eric Gonzalez,
the district attorney in Brooklyn
who was elected on a progressive
platform and has argued that pub-
lic safety is better served by
putting fewer people in jails, in-
cluding young gun offenders.
A spokesman for Mr. Gonzalez
declined to comment on the new
initiative Wednesday.
Last month, in a letter to the
N.Y.P.D., a group of elected poli-
ticians representing Brooklyn
raised concerns about whether
police officials were coordinating
with federal authorities in an ef-
fort to circumvent a new bail law
in New York, which vastly in-
creased the number of defendants
who could be freed before trial
without paying bail.
At Wednesday’s news confer-
ence, Police Commissioner Der-
mot F. Shea denied the accusation.
Police officials have attacked
the bail reforms, which went into
effect this year, as a driver of
crime even though the city’s own
analysis suggests that the bail law
has had little to do with the rise inviolence. Shootings in New York
stayed relatively stable for more
than four months after the law
went into effect and began to in-
crease in May, the analysis found.
Mr. DuCharme declined to at-
tribute the rise in shootings to spe-
cific drivers, saying there were
“certainly upsides” to bail reform
while noting that it has caused
“some potential problems.”
But he said the public percep-
tion that recent reforms would
lead to a less aggressive law en-
forcement presence in the city has
contributed to the violence. He
also pointed to the psychological
pressure and trauma of both the
pandemic and Mr. Floyd’s killing
as factors.
“Armed, violent criminal of-
fenders have just gotten way too
comfortable walking around the
city with some feeling of impuni-
ty,” he said.
The violence has fueled a bitter
debate among city leaders over
what’s driving it. The pandemic
has caused widespread job losses
and cuts to many social services,
fraying the institutions that had
previously helped to reduce vio-
lence.
In the past two months in
Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Is-
land, 83 percent of the people ar-
rested on gun-related crimes in
state court were released from
custody before trial, compared
with 32 percent in federal court,
according to data provided by the
Eastern District.
Since 2015, the average sen-
tence in state court in those bor-
oughs for a gun-related charge
has been 10 months, compared
with 45 months in federal court,
the Eastern District said.
Federal officials said imposing
swift punishment for gun violence
has proved to be a deterrent
against violent crime.
But even the Eastern District’s
own cases show the challenges of
using the cycle of prosecution and
incarceration as a sustained way
to prevent shootings.
Last month, a defendant was
charged federally for a shooting in
Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighbor-
hood. At the time of the shooting,
he had just been released from
prison for a federal conspiracy
conviction.Seth DuCharme, acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said New
York City was “not as safe as it could be or once was.”ANGELA WEISS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGESU.S. Attorney, Citing Rise
In Gun Crime, Will Take
More Lower-Level Cases
By NICOLE HONGBrooklyn is thrust into
a national debate
about law and order.
FRONT PAGE
An article on Saturday about
fading hopes of an economic
recovery in Europe misstated
how long cafes and bars in Paris
have been ordered shut in re-
sponse to a surge in coronavirus
cases. They have been ordered
shut for two weeks, not two
months.
An article on Monday about
Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Presi-
dent Trump’s Supreme Court
nominee, misstated the page on
which a high school yearbook
image of Judge Barrett appeared.
It was on a page about the stu-
dent newspaper, not above an “In
the News” item stating that the
Supreme Court had not expanded
or modified abortion rights.NATIONAL
An article on Wednesday about a
call by Dr. Anthony Fauci for the
Trump campaign to take down an
ad that he said was misleading
misidentified the profession of Dr.
Jay Bhattacharya. He is an econo-
mist, not an epidemiologist.BUSINESS
An article on Monday about Ama-
zon’s expansion to France mis-
stated the unemployment rate in
the Gard region of France. It is 9.8
percent, not nearly 17 percent,which was the rate in 2017.ARTS
An article on Wednesday about
the flutist Brandon Patrick
George misspelled the name of a
modern-music ensemble based in
Paris. It is the Ensemble Inter-
contemporain, not Intercompo-
rain.Errors are corrected during the press
run whenever possible, so some errors
noted here may not have appeared in
all editions.Corrections
Some of the calls reported an in-
jured seal. Others said they had
seen a shark. Still others implored
officials to help what appeared to
be a stranded fish.
By early afternoon on Monday,
dozens of people had called emer-
gency officials in Wareham, on the
southeast coast of Massachusetts.
The town’s Department of Natural
Resources dispatched two officers
to investigate.
They soon discovered that the
odd-looking creature lolling in a
cove off Buzzards Bay was no
cause for alarm. It was an ocean
sunfish, an enormous, bloblike
creature that eats jellyfish and
has a dorsal fin that, to the un-
trained eye, can resemble that of a
shark.
The calls about it had become so
voluminous, however, that the
Wareham Department of Natural
Resources was compelled to issue
a plea on Facebook. The fish was
swimming, it said, adding: “It is
not stranded or suffering. The
sunfish is FINE.”
It added, “PLEASE STOP
CALLING THE POLICE DE-
PARTMENT ABOUT THIS SUN-
FISH!!”
Garry Buckminster, the depart-
ment’s director and Wareham’s
harbormaster, said he began get-
ting calls from concerned resi-
dents as early as 6:30 a.m. on
Monday.
“When you see them coming
along, it looks like this massive fin
coming out of the water,” he said of
the sunfish.
“We get it,” he added, referring
to the concern residents had ex-
pressed. “But 911 isn’t a good ave-
nue to report fish that are swim-
ming around.”
Swimming in parts of New Eng-
land has become an unsettling ex-
perience in recent years, particu-
larly around Cape Cod, where
great white sharks have increas-
ingly become prevalent in recent
years, coming into closer contact
with swimmers.
In Wareham, a town of about
22,000 near the Cape, officials
have occasionally warned resi-
dents to be aware of potential
shark activity.
So it was not surprising that the
appearance of the peaceful sun-
fish once again confused resi-dents, marine specialists said.
Mr. Buckminster recalled one
summer more than 20 years ago
when the dorsal fin of a sunfish
terrified swimmers at Onset
Beach.
“Everyone went running out of
the water,” he said, “and it was just
this big goofy fish.”
Sunfish move by oscillating
their dorsal fins at the water’s sur-
face, an odd-looking way of swim-
ming that can sometimes make it
appear as if they are hurt.
In 2015, the fish famously con-
fused two men who filmed the
creature as they toured Boston
Harbor in a boat.
“That’s a tuna, bro!” one of
them exclaimed in a profanity-
laced video that was widely circu-
lated online.
Ocean sunfish, the heaviest
bony fish in the ocean, are often
described as slow, clumsy swim-
mers, but that is an unfair charac-
terization, said Carol Carson,
founder of the New England
Coastal Wildlife Alliance, a con-
servation group that has rescued
sunfish that became stranded in
Massachusetts coves and inlets
during their migration south.
“These are powerful fish,” said
Ms. Carson, a whale biologist who
is known as Krill. “They can dive
over 2,500 feet.”
They are also extremely curi-
ous, she said.
Chris Whitton, owner of the
Neat Lady Fishing Company,
which operates fishing boats in
Buzzards Bay, said it was not un-usual for sunfish to swim right up
to his boats.
“I’ve had them come right up to
the side of the boat, and they lift
one eye to look at you and you’re
looking back at it,” he said.
“They’re very docile and they’re
not going to hurt anybody.”
Ms. Carson said spitting was
the most aggressive behavior she
had seen a sunfish exhibit. She
added that she has used kayaks
and ropes to tow stranded sunfish
into deeper water.
She recalled one rescue when a
stranded sunfish became so frus-
trated that it swam to one of the
kayakers who was trying to help it
and spat. The fish then swam to
Ms. Carson and spat at her, she
said.
On Monday, she had just fin-
ished rescuing a sunfish in
Wellfleet when she saw the Ware-
ham Department of Natural Re-
sources’s post on Facebook.
Ms. Carson said she worried
that the fish might have made a
wrong turn into the cove as it tried
to swim south. Wareham officials
told her that the fish had not been
seen since Monday and did not ap-
pear to be stranded.
She said anyone who sees a sun-
fish in a harbor or inlet in Massa-
chusetts this time of year should
contact her organization.
“They shouldn’t be there,” Ms.
Carson said. “These are healthy
fish that have just wandered into
the wrong place, and it’s usually a
cove, a harbor, or tidal area. They
can’t figure out how to get out.”It’s a Fish, Officials Say. Can You Stop Calling 911 Now?
By MARIA CRAMERThe dorsal fins of ocean sun-
fish can resemble those of
sharks to the untrained eye.JOSE JORDAN/A.F.P. — GETTY IMAGESAlain Delaquérière contributed re-
search.
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