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The
district attorney Cy Vance said Amy Cooper, 41, faces an Oct. 14
arraignment over the incident, which was captured on a video
that went viral and touched off a national conversation about
"white privilege."
"We are strongly committed to holding perpetrators of this
conduct accountable," Vance said in a statement.
Filing a false report is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one
year in jail.
Cooper had been walking her dog on May 25 in an area of Central
Park known as the Ramble when she encountered Christian Cooper,
an avid bird-watcher not related to her.
Christian Cooper has said he asked her to leash her dog, and
when she refused offered the dog treats.
Amy Cooper was shown in the video saying she would tell the
police "there's an African-American man threatening my life,"
which was false, and telling a 911 operator that Christian
Cooper was threatening her and her dog, referring to him twice
as "African-American."
The video has more than 44.7 million views on Twitter.
The incident occurred a few hours before the death of George
Floyd in Minneapolis, where a police officer pinned his neck to
the ground with a knee, touched off nationwide protests over
racial injustice.
After video of the Central Park incident went viral, Cooper was
fired from her job at the Franklin Templeton asset manager, and
she publicly apologized.
In a statement on Monday, Cooper's lawyer Robert Barnes said she
would be found not guilty, and faulted a "rush to judgment" by
some about the case.
"She lost her job, her home, and her public life. Now some
demand her freedom?" Barnes said. "How many lives are we going
to destroy over misunderstood 60-second videos on social media?"
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York, Editing by
Marguerita Choy)
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