Police in Rochester, New York, have come under renewed criticism after a camera showed a police officer spraying pepper on a nine-year-old handcuffed girl.
Video released by police showed the girl being restrained after police officers were summoned to a family disturbance on Friday. Crying and screaming “I want my dad”, the girl was driven to a police car and was sitting in the back seat when a policeman said to his colleague, “Just spray her now”.
The police start spraying the nine-year-old with pepper, who screams and screams, “Clean my eyes, please.” An office then closes the car door. The video shows that at least seven police officers were present.
Rochester police were already under scrutiny over the death of a mentally ill black man in March 2020. Daniel Prude, 41, died of suffocation after police put a hood over his head and pressed his head to the floor for two minutes.
Rochester police released camera images of the body six months after Prude’s death after his family sued the city. The incident sparked national protests. The police chief was fired.
Regarding Friday’s incident, Andre Anderson, deputy chief of police for Rochester, said the officers were told that the girl “indicated that she wanted to kill herself and wanted to kill her mother.”
Anderson told reporters that police chased the girl while she tried to escape. The police decided to take the nine-year-old to the hospital, but Anderson said the girl refused to get into the police car.
“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 try to get him into the car, a police officer sprayed the child with OC spray to get him into the car.”
The video shows police officers fighting with the nine-year-old boy in the snow. At one point, an officer said, “You are acting like a child.”
The girl replies: “I am a child”.
Rochester’s chief of police, Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan, said: “I’m not going to stand here and say that for a nine-year-old to have to be sprayed with pepper is okay. We will do the work that we have to do to ensure that this type of thing does not happen ”.
However, the president of the Rochester police union defended the officers involved.
“[The officer] made a decision that he considered the best action to be taken. It did not result in any injuries to her, ”Mike Mazzeo, president of the Rochester Police Locust Club, told reporters. “If they had to go and push harder, and use more strength, there is a good chance that she could have been hurt even more.”
Mazzeo added: “It is very, very difficult to put someone in the back of a police car like that.”
Rochester’s Mayor Lovely Warren said that speaking as the mother of a 10-year-old daughter, the video “is nothing you want to see.”
Inside a statement, Warren added: “I am deeply concerned about the macing and handcuffs of a child who is in danger and clearly emotional.”