Christian Cooper, a Black man whose video of a white woman calling police on him because he asked her to leash her dog in a bird sanctuary in New York’s Central Park went viral and resulted in her losing her job, says the woman does not deserve the death threats she’s received.

“Where she went was a racist place. That action was racist. Does that make her a racist? I can’t answer that. Only she can with what she does going forward,” said Cooper, 57, in an interview with the New York Daily News. “Maybe she was trying to gain an advantage. She went there, and she needs to reflect on what she did.” 

In the Monday (May 25) incident, the two encountered each other in an area designated for birdwatching. Amy Cooper, 41, was walking through with an unleashed dog. When Christian Cooper asked her to place the animal on a leash to protect the birds and their environment, she became irate and threatened to call police saying, “an African American man is threatening my life.” 

By the next day (May 26), the video, posted on social media by his sister Melody, had exploded on the internet, with leagues of people blasting the woman, calling her racist and accusing her of weaponizing police against a Black man. Franklin Templeton, the investment firm that employed her, fired her before the day was out.

But Christian Cooper questions what firing the woman actually achieved. 

“I can’t see how that addresses the underlying issues. I think it’s important to move beyond this instance and this one individual. Too much focus has been put on her when it really is about the underlying issues that have plagued this city and this country for centuries. Racial issues,” he told the Daily News. 

He was called out the death threats that Amy Cooper has received from people angry about what they saw in the video. 

“I don’t think she was thinking in that moment. I’m very upset she’s getting death threats. That’s antithetical to the appropriate response,” he said. “If you’re upset that she put my life in danger by trying to bring the cops down on a Black man, then how can you turn around and make a death threat? That makes no sense. It’s downright awful.”

But the whole thing, he said, could have been avoided if the police had actually come and made her observe park rules.

“There are clearly posted rules. Dogs have to be on leashes. If there had been regular enforcement, Ms. Cooper and I might have never had our dust-up,” he said. “She was clearly in the wrong. If the police had come, hopefully they would have given her a ticket.”