Two Standards of Justice, When Black Lives Matter ! #Blacklivesmatter #BlackHistory Month #amycooper #rehabilitation

 WAY TO GO? WAY TO GO!

“An African American man is threatening my life!” Amy Cooper, a white woman screamed as she called the police for help falsely telling them that “he had threatened her.” The incident took place in Central Park, New York, last spring, 2020.

The case against her was dismissed on Tuesday, February 16, 2021, Jonah E. Bromwich writes in The New York Times. (Jonah is a courts reporter for the New York Times.)

Really? Why? As we say in Jamaica: “It’s a long story!” 

Amy Cooper who “was publicly shamed and lost her job after the encounter in Central Park, has finished an education program about racial bias.” That’s why.

“The therapy focused on the way that racial identities shape people’s lives, an assistant district attorney said at the hearing.”

Ms. Cooper had five sessions with her therapist and she “learned a lot,” the prosecutor said.

The program that Ms. Cooper was offered “falls under the rubric of restorative justice partially based on her lack of criminal background. It is an alternative to traditional prosecution, looks at the harm done and implements a process for reconciliation among the parties involved, including the offender, the victim and the community.”

The article said: Ms. Cooper’s lawyer thanked the Manhattan district attorney’s office for “a thorough and honest inquiry.”

On June 14, 2020 Sarah Maslin Nir wrote, in The New York Times, “The inside story of the Black birder and the white woman who called the police on him. Their encounter stirred wrenching conversation about racism and white privilege.”

It was, “An encounter that was brief but would reverberate in New York City, and beyond, stirring anguished conversations about racism and hypocrisy in one of the nation’s most progressive cities.

Only a few hours later George Floyd would be killed in Minneapolis when a police officer pinned Mr. Floyd’s neck under his knee. The two Memorial Day incidents captured on video two facets of entrenched racism Black people experience: one the horrors of police brutality; the other the routine humiliations and threats in daily life.” 

The writer described Mr. Cooper as “a mentor to neophyte birders who carries gravitas as a member of the board of the New York City Audubon Society.”

It’s all over now. Or is it? 

It’s a long story.

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