A video from the body’s camera showing a Rochester police officer spraying pepper on a mother with a child last month is “disturbing,” the city mayor said in a statement.
A statement from the Rochester Police Department said that on February 22, police responded to a call from an alleged store thief “who was arguing with store employees and refusing to leave”.
The video from the body camera shows a policeman talking to a woman with her son while she shows the contents of her bag, pulling on a loose diaper and saying she didn’t take anything from the drugstore. When the policeman says he is going to check with the store employees, but she has to stay with him, she runs off with her son. In the video, the police blurred the child’s face.
A policeman chases her, puts her on the floor and tries to handcuff her while she screams, “I didn’t steal anything”, and the child groans in the background.
The woman received pepper spray during her arrest, according to a statement from Rochester police.
The child was not sprayed with pepper spray or injured, police said. The woman was accused of trespassing.
Rochester’s interim police chief, Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan, said on Friday: “You will see where the mother and child are really clinging.”
The chief indicated that it is his initial response that the use of force was within the policy.
“Some things for me are not as simple as if a policy was followed. Our indicators show that it is,” she said.
“If the person is physically resisting, you are generally safe with the use of pepper spray,” she said. “You just want to go as far as is necessary. You don’t want to go any further.”
The police officer involved was placed on administrative leave while an internal investigation is underway, according to the police.
A subsequent video from the body camera shows a police officer later addressing the woman as “sweetheart”, asking if she wants to rinse her eyes and saying that she can appear on the news later because at least one viewer was filming.
Mayor Lovely Warren said in a statement that the videos from the cameras on the body of the incident “are certainly disturbing”.
“When incidents like this occur, I am relieved to have ensured that body cameras are used by our police, so that we can see what is happening on our streets and hold police officers accountable,” she said.
Herriott-Sullivan “is working to make radical but necessary changes in policies and procedures, along with mandatory training for officers on racism and implicit prejudice,” said Warren. “The change will not come until we have the ability to hold our executives fully accountable when they violate public confidence.”
The incident occurs about a month after a Rochester police officer was suspended and two were placed on administrative leave after a video was released showing authorities spraying pepper on a 9-year-old girl while responding to a “family problems” report, the authorities said.
The video from the body camera showed the police handcuffing the girl as she repeatedly shouted for her father and refused to get into the vehicle. “You are acting like a child,” one of the policemen told him at one point.
“I am a child”, she can be heard answering.
In this video, the police can be heard saying that they would spray it with pepper spray if it continued to resist. And then one does.
In a statement released on Friday, the Rochester City Police Accountability Council said that two officers at the most recent prison site were also at the scene in the child’s previous pepper spraying incident. It is unclear what role they played in any of the incidents.
“The Police Accountability Council is disturbed by what it saw,” said the council’s statement, adding that there were “worrying parallels between the two incidents.
“Both incidents involved black mothers. Both involved black children. Both involved blacks obviously in crisis. Both involved police officers using pepper spray on or around a black child,” said the statement from the Police Accountability Council.
The statement said that videos of the body’s camera that the police released in the February 22 incident show a policeman saying to a viewer, “Shut up and get out of here.”
In the February 22 incident, a police officer who is holding the child also tells another to use a car to block the child from witnesses, saying that it does not look good that he has to restrain a 3-year-old child.
One police officer says a call has been made to the Family and Crisis Intervention Team, but another responds that “they said they are not even logged in yet,” according to the Police Accountability Council.
Both incidents “appear not to have involved the Person in Crisis Team, the Family and Crisis Intervention Team, or mental health professionals. Both involved police officers who did nothing to effectively lessen the situation,” the statement said. “Both involved apparent intimidation of passers-by filming the incident. Without the courage of passers-by, who were willing to stand up and hold the police to account, both incidents may never have been brought to light.”
The clashes come less than a year after Daniel Prude, 41, died while being restrained by Rochester police with a “spit hood” on his head.
The police found Prude wandering naked down the street after allegedly breaking a shop window, and he can be seen on a camera spitting in the direction of police and heard that he was infected with the coronavirus. The officials said that this led them to use the hood.
The head of the police department and all command personnel resigned after Prude’s death, and the city enacted law enforcement reforms, including the withdrawal of crisis police intervention.
The city launched a “people in crisis” response team, but did not respond to the incident with the 9-year-old child because the initial 911 call was unjustified, Warren said.
Herriott-Sullivan said at the news conference on Friday that, as it was a call about a crime, he was treated as such.
“In this case, remember, there were criminal charges brought by the victims, which are Rite-Aid,” said Herriott-Sullivan. “FACIT’s [Family And Crisis Intervention Team] it will not be useful when it is being processed. This is no time for that. Time is follow up later. “