Video shows Rochester police confronting and peppering a black woman in front of a child.

Police in Rochester, New York, are once again under investigation into the use of pepper spray after a video released on Friday shows the police spraying the irritating chemical on the face of a black woman holding her son’s hand. three years. “It looks like our officers are out of control,” Mary Lupien, a city councilor, told the New York Times.

The incident occurred on February 22 and occurred less than a month after the uproar over pepper spray by the police in a handcuffed nine-year-old boy. Videos from police cameras released on Friday show how a police officer confronted a woman who was carrying her son after a burglar was reported to a nearby Rite Aid. “Did you steal from that store?” an officer says to the woman. “Oh come on, they said you stole it. What did you get? Tell me the truth!”

The woman denies stealing anything and opened her purse to show the police. The police officer tells the woman that she needs to stay until store employees can be contacted. But the woman starts to run away with her son. The policeman picks her up and starts to drop her on the floor to handcuff her while her son can be heard screaming and crying. “I didn’t steal anything,” repeated the woman. A second police officer arrives and picks up the child and when the woman tries to grab her son again, a police officer sprays pepper on the woman’s face before proceeding to attack her again and handcuff her. Security camera footage shows how the child was suspended in the air between his mother and the policeman before his mother left. “Stop. Oh my God, what’s wrong with her?” The policeman who grabbed the child can be heard talking about the mother.

Although the child was not sprayed, the authorities warned that this could have happened and raised questions about how the police dealt with the young child. “These disturbing incidents prove that the Rochester Police Department needs to fundamentally change its organizational culture,” said the city’s Police Responsibility Council in a statement. “These incidents also confirm our community’s call to fundamentally reimagine public security.” These latest pepper spray incidents came after the Rochester Police Department was already facing outrage and an investigation into the death last year of Daniel Prude, a black man who died after police arrested him and put on a “spit hood. ”Over your head.