A police officer in Rochester, New York, was put on administrative duty after using pepper spray on a woman suspected of theft in a store who tried to escape with her three-year-old son in her arms, officials said on Friday.
The video of the February 22 incident was made public at a time when the Rochester police department is under intense scrutiny about interactions with black residents, including the death of Daniel Prude last spring.
Prude, a 44-year-old African-American, died after police put him in a hood and kept him naked on an icy street. Authorities said last month that the officers involved will not face charges.
The video from the body camera of the last meeting showed the woman, who is black, running from a white police officer who stopped her on the street and said she had been accused of stealing from a convenience store.
The policeman chased the woman down the sidewalk, then fought to subdue her while trying not to hurt the screaming child. Another officer arrived and carried the child several meters away. A police statement said the woman was sprayed with pepper spray during the arrest.
“The child was not hit with pepper spray or injured during the arrest,” the statement said.
The woman, whose name has not been released, has been charged with trespassing.
Police chief Cynthia Herriot-Sullivan told reporters on Friday that the policeman seemed to follow the protocol, but “some things for me are not as simple as following a policy or not.”
“Just because we can do certain things, it doesn’t mean we should,” she said. “Can we get to the same place using a different strategy?”
The city’s Police Accountability Council, an entity created by a 2019 electoral referendum to investigate allegations of police misconduct, said it saw “worrying parallels” with another emergency call in which officers threw pepper spray at a girl nine years old that they had handcuffed and placed in the back seat of a police car during a family dispute.
“Both incidents involved black mothers,” said PAB president Shani Wilson. “Both involved black children. Both involved blacks obviously in crisis. Both involved police officers using pepper spray on or around a black child. “