White women calling the police on blacks has become more publicized in recent years. In a 2020 article in "The New York Times" titled "How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror", black columnist Charles M. Blow wrote, “historically, white women have used the violence of white men and the institutions these men control as their own muscle. Untold numbers of lynchings were executed because white women had claimed that a black man raped, assaulted, talked to or glanced at them. This exercise in racial extremism has been dragged into the modern era through the weaponizing of 9-1-1, often by white women, to invoke the power and force of the police who they are fully aware are hostile to black men“. White women in the U.S. who used their white privilege as a weapon have been given a different name over the centuries by black people, with Karen a contemporary name. In May 2020, a white woman calling the police on a black man bird-watching in Central Park, New York received wide publicity after it was caught on film. After he had asked her to put her dog on a leash (as per the rules in an area of the park to protect other wildlife), she approached him, to which he responded “Please don't come close to me", before she yelled, "I'm taking a picture and calling the cops. I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." During her phone call, with the man standing a distance away from her and recording her, she spoke in an audibly distraught voice, "There's a man, African American, he is.. threatening me and my dog. Please send the cops immediately!". Other examples of white women calling the police on blacks include reporting an eight-year-old girl for selling bottles of water without a permit in San Francisco, reporting a black family barbecuing in a park in Oakland, California, blocking a black man from entering an apartment building in St. Louis, Missouri where he is a resident before calling the police, and a woman accusing a boy of groping her in a store in Brooklyn, New York, which was disproven by surveillance.