The Rochester Police Department in New York on Sunday released footage of the body’s camera, showing officers handcuffed and pepper spraying a 9-year-old girl as they responded to a call for “family problems.”
The two disturbing videos show the anguished child screaming for his father as the police tried to restrain him and make him sit inside a police vehicle on Friday afternoon.
“You are acting like a child,” a police officer is heard telling her in the video.
“I am a child,” she shouts.
“I’m going to spray you with pepper and I don’t want to,” says a police officer to the girl as she tries to get her to put her feet inside the police car.
“This is your last chance. Otherwise, the pepper spray will get in your eyes,” said the policeman.
The girl, whose face was blurred in the videos, begs the police not to spray her. After being sprayed with pepper, she cries: “It was in my eyes, it entered my eyes.”
Authorities did not identify the child, his family or any of the officers involved in the incident.
“I’m not going to stay here and say that for a 9-year-old child to have to be peppered with pepper is fine,” Rochester Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan said at a news conference on Sunday. “It isn’t. I don’t see who we are as a department.”
The incident brought new scrutiny to a police department whose senior officials resigned last September after protests over the death of Daniel Prude, a black man who died of suffocation after Rochester police officers put a hood over his head and arrested him in the floor.
Rochester’s Mayor Lovely Warren said Friday’s incident “was not something that any of us should want to justify”.
She said the young woman reminded her of her own daughter.
“I have a 10 year old daughter. So she is a child. She’s a baby, ”said Warren. “And I can say that this video, as a mother, is nothing you want to see.”
“I saw my baby’s face in your face,” she said in an emotional plea for compassion and empathy in the way police officers act in the community.
Warren said he asked the police chief to conduct a full and transparent investigation into the incident, adding that she received a review from the police accountability board.
Police officers who responded to a “family problems” report at 3:21 pm, Friday local time, were informed that the 9-year-old girl was “upset” and “suicidal” and indicated that she “wanted to kill herself and that she he wanted to kill his mother, “Rochester Executive Police Chief Andre Anderson said on Sunday.
The video from the body’s camera shows a policeman following the girl, who was wearing a sweatshirt with colored leggings and carrying a backpack, while she tried to escape.
As the policeman tries to calm the girl down, she begins to argue heatedly with her mother about a family dispute. The policeman then asks the mother to leave.
Anderson said the policeman decided to “get the child out of the situation and put him in a car where we could get help”.
But the girl refused, he said, and “struggled,” at one point, kicking a policeman in the chest and dropping a camera close to her body.
The video shows policemen struggling to contain the child as he repeatedly yells, “I want my father”.
The police then handcuff the child while he is on the snow-covered ground and try to make him sit inside the police vehicle.
“I just want to see my dad, please,” the child begs, asking for a “female officer”.
In the second video from the body camera, the police officer is seen trying to calm the child and get her to put her legs inside the car, promising him that he will try to find his father.
After unsuccessful attempts, the policeman cries out to the girl that she will spray pepper if she does not obey.
A policeman said, “Just spray it. Just spray it now.”
The police officer is seen shaking a can; a can is also seen in the hand of the other officer. It is not clear who sprayed the child with pepper spray.
“It didn’t look like she was resisting the cops. She was trying not to be contained to go to the hospital,” said Anderson. “While the police were making several attempts to get him into the car, a police officer sprayed the child with OC spray to get him into the car.”
She was then transported to Rochester General Hospital and later released.
Anderson said he was not trying to “make excuses for what happened” and that the changes will happen “by actually talking to the police officers involved and getting them to take a look at reducing the escalation”.
“Our overall goal is to change the culture,” he said.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. You can also send a text message with TALK to 741741 for free, anonymous support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on the Crisis Text Line.