Why ask me what the facts are? Gather all the available (existing) evidence...evaluate it and make a determination.
How many different ways could this matter have gone? Could both parties have taken steps to avoid it? Could the gentleman have walked away and reported the matter to the police or park officials? Could she have walked away, especially once she found herself in a "threatening" situation based upon the comments attributed to both parties in the USA Today article?
Facts and evidence have a funny way of showing that oftentimes neither party is entirely wrong, or entirely right. I'm not backing either horse in this race.
Labeling people, white or black is bad. Imagine if the news were calling someone of color by a pejorative term.
When we attempted to right the ship that is the USA, we forgot to turn the wheel to set the course to straight ahead instead of going off course in an equally unacceptable direction.
It's not okay with me. Same rules for everyone. No special rules for anyone.
There's nothing civil about this war.
I think we're in for a summer of this, provided people stay cooped up and out of work. Anything not well-secured is going to come loose from its moorings, and folks that normally would have had the good sense to walk away are going to stand there and get in a dumb argument.
While it sure sounds like he said something stupid--"if you're going to do whatever you want, then I'm going to do whatever I want, and you won't like it"--I think that she may have felt threatened but responded with aggression. Christian should have walked away from the crazy lady instead of getting into the NYC equivalent of a "muh rights as an American" fight. And I'm pretty sure that we're not seeing the real Amy Cooper here, but rather, someone that's under some stress and not coping well. Unfortunately for her, the merciless internet exists--whatever happens to one of us, happens to all of us, and none of us is as terrible as all of us.
I have never been one to phone police to report suspicious activity, maybe doing so once or twice in my entire life. At this point, honestly, a black person could be doing absolutely abhorrent criminal acts and I'm not calling police. It's not worth losing my job and showing up on CNN over.
Sure, there's a difference between calling police on a black person for "bbq in a park" versus "raping an unconscious person behind a tree" but there's lots of shades of grey in between and as a white person, if there's any slim percentage the person can call it racism, I'm totally boned now.
So, I say this in all seriousness, I don't care what criminal actions a black person is doing, I'm looking the other way. It's clearly what society wants. I know this sounds like I'm trolling, but I'm not. African American teen snooping around bushes in front of people's houses at night? Not my circus, not my ponies. I'm no George Zimmerman.
Racism does exist, has always existed and will always exist, and in most cases there's a clear distinction between criminal activity and "stupid stuff that annoys Karens" but the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that I can't risk losing my job, having my family be subject to death threats, and being posted on reddit to be doxxed.
Unfortunately all we have is the video. She was triggered by that dude and he recorded it.
She'll probably get a nice settlement from her employer for being fired without cause.
And that dude will probably continue to record people in Central park until somebody puts him on life support.
Life goes on.
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
While I feel quite alienated from the modern GOP, and I think Trump is a turd, I would observe that many of the "progressives" I know are some of the nastiest, most socially and emotionally violent people I know.
Also, I wonder if her employer said (off the record) "Holy shit! This is the chance we've been waiting for!"
I was into 10mm Auto before it sold out and went mainstream, but these days I'm here for the revolver and epidemiology information.