The 9-year-old black girl was handcuffed in the back seat of a police car, upset and crying for her father as white policemen grew increasingly impatient as they tried to drag her fully into the vehicle.
“This is your last chance,” warned an officer. “Otherwise, the pepper spray will get in your eyes.”
Less than 90 seconds later, the girl had been sprayed and shouted, “Please, clean my eyes! Clean my eyes, please! “
What started with a report of “family problems” in Rochester, New York, and ended with the police treating a fourth grader as a crime suspect, generated outrage as the latest example of police mistreatment of blacks.
While the United States is undergoing a new assessment of police brutality and racial injustice after George Floyd’s death last May, the treatment of the girl illustrates how even young children are not exempt.
Research shows that black children are often seen as being older than they are and are more likely to be seen as threatening or dangerous. Defenders have long said that this leads the police to treat them in ways that they would not even dream of treating white children. In some cases, this led to deaths like the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black girl shot by a white police officer in Cleveland in 2014.
“Black children have never had the opportunity to be children,” said Kristin Henning, a law professor and director of the Georgetown Law Clinic and Youth Justice Initiative.
A study published in the journal Pediatrics in late 2020 found that black children and adolescents were six times more likely to die of police shots than white children. It analyzed data on the use of police force in situations involving young people aged between 12 and 17 years from 2003 to 2018.
“Black children really were seen as older, more guilty, less rehabilitable and less worthy of Western notions of innocence and Western notions of childhood,” said Henning.
The Rochester headlines were deeply personal to Mando Avery, whose 7-year-old son was hit by pepper spray from a policeman targeting someone else during a protest in Seattle last summer. The spray left his son’s face and chest sore and swollen from chemical burns for several days, and even required a visit to the emergency room.
Since then, he has had nightmares and now fears the police. Small things can bring back bad memories, like using a spray to style your hair.
“Their innocence goes away much, much sooner,” said Avery. “What kind of tantrum does it take to handcuff a child?”
In the case of Rochester, the girl’s mother called the police on January 29 after an argument with her husband and said she asked police officers to call mental health services when her daughter became increasingly upset.
But the video from the police body’s camera shows only the policemen at the scene, first handcuffing the girl’s hands behind her back and then growing increasingly impatient as they tried to get her into the police car, culminating in pepper spray.
There is a point in the video where a police officer says, “You are acting like a child!” to which the girl replies: “I am a child!”
The officers were suspended pending an investigation. More videos released Thursday showed the wait until an ambulance arrived for the girl.
The case comes months after the high-profile death last spring of Daniel Prude, a black man experiencing a mental health crisis when his family called the Rochester police. The police handcuffed him and put a hood over his head when he spat on them. While he fought, they pinned him flat on the floor, a policeman pushing his head to the pavement until he stopped breathing.
The mother of the 9-year-old girl, Elba Pope, told the Associated Press that she did not think white police officers saw their daughter in the same way that they would have seen a white child.
“If they had looked at her as if she were one of their children, they would not have thrown pepper at her,” she said.
Henning agreed. “This is where the racial issue comes into play,” she said. “If that child looked like one of his daughters, looked like the child they put in bed, it is much less likely that they would have done so.”
The president of the Rochester police union said the officers did not lack compassion, but were dealing with a difficult situation with limited resources and were following the department’s protocol.
New York is not the only place where police treatment of black children has been a critical issue.
In the suburb of Denver, four black girls aged 6 to 17 were detained by police at gunpoint after being unfairly suspected of being in a stolen car last year.
A policeman tried to handcuff the 6-year-old girl, who wore a tiara on what was supposed to be a girl’s day with her relatives, but the handcuffs were too big, according to a lawsuit filed by the family.
In North Texas, a white police officer was videotaped pushing a black girl in a bathing suit to the floor at a pool party in 2015. Later that year, a sheriff’s assistant at a school in South Carolina he threw a girl on the floor and dragged her around the classroom after she refused to hand over her cell phone in math class.
In the case of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy was playing with a toy gun in November 2014 when the Cleveland police, answering a call, stopped and shot him in seconds. When her 14-year-old sister ran to the scene, she was thrown on the floor and handcuffed. The police were not charged.
It is this story that makes Christian Gibbs, a black father of three daughters, grateful that the girl in Rochester was no longer seriously injured – and irritated that this is even a concern.
“Thank God she was not killed. … And the fact that we have to say this is already a denunciation of the type of treatment we hope to be given, even for young children, ”said Gibbs, 46, of Bowie, Maryland.
Holly M. Frye, of South Ogden, Utah, said she has almost daily conversations with her three children about how to act around police officers, the same type of conversation her parents had with her.
“This type of aggression against the black race has always existed, it is only being registered now,” she said. “It is a subject that never leaves our kitchen table, we are always talking about it.”
Although data on very young children’s interactions with the police are sparse, black youth are almost five times more likely to be incarcerated compared to white youth, according to an analysis by the non-profit organization The Sentencing Project.
The incarceration rate for young whites is 83 per 100,000; for young blacks that number jumps to 383, The Sentencing Project found. While this is partly due to differences in crime, studies have found that black teenagers are more likely to be arrested and face serious consequences compared to their white peers, the report said.
And it’s not just about policing and the criminal justice system. Black students face higher rates of suspension and expulsion from school, said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, which fights structural racism.
It is “the way our black children are questioned by adults, with this underlying assumption that they cannot be believed, cannot be trusted and that they are always up to something wrong,” she said.
This leads to trauma and distrust on the part of black youth in relation to the authorities around them, she said.
“There is no ‘friendly officer’ for black children,” she said.
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Hajela reported from Essex County, New Jersey, Whitehurst reported from Salt Lake City. Associated Press editor Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York contributed to this report.
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Hajela is a member of the Associated Press race and ethnicity reporting team.