A 9-year-old girl sprayed with pepper spray by police in Rochester, New York last month pleaded, “Officer, please don’t do this to me” while waiting handcuffed in the back seat of a police vehicle, according to Video from the police body’s camera released Thursday.
“You did this to yourself, dear,” replies a police officer in the front seat.
The nearly 90-minute video is a compilation of edited images from police officers’ cameras. The police department had previously said that police officers were responding to a “family problems” report.
In the extended video of the January 29 incident, the girl can be heard sobbing, whimpering and repeatedly saying, “I want my dad”. She also tells the police that her handcuffs are too tight and that her eyes are burning. She asks several times when an ambulance will come to clean the pepper spray from her eyes and begs for the handcuffs to be removed. A police officer can be heard telling her that an ambulance is on the way.
“If you stick your head in the direction of the window, the cold air will be pleasant,” a policeman told her.
“It’s burning a lot,” says the girl.
“It’s to burn. It’s called pepper spray,” replies a police officer.
An ambulance arrived about 15 minutes after the girl was sprayed with pepper spray, estimated the Democrat and Chronicle, a Rochester newspaper. The newspaper said that more than 23 minutes passed before one of the handcuffs in which it had been placed was removed.
The new video is from several police officers’ body cameras and was edited to blur the girl’s face. Mayor Lovely Warren said she would release all video from body cameras after they were edited.
“We are committed to being transparent and sharing all information and videos about this incident and all of our investigations with the community,” Warren said in a statement on Thursday. “I continue to share our community’s outrage at the treatment of this child and have ensured that she and her family have received the support they need through our Person in Crisis team.”
The newly released video offers a more complete picture of the incident, which attracted international attention and attracted renewed scrutiny for a distressed police department. The way police officers deal with a child in distress has sparked local protests and calls for immediate police reform. The officers’ actions were condemned by Warren, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Rochester police are being investigated for the death of Daniel Prude in police custody last year. The police handcuffed Prude, a black man, put a spit hood on his head and pressed it to the floor. The video of the body’s camera in Prude’s case was released six months after his death, only after his family sued the city. He showed Prude, who had mental health problems, handcuffed and naked with a spit hood on his head.
Cuomo said the videos released on Thursday were “even more shocking and disturbing” than previous footage from the meeting.
“This is symptomatic of a wider problem – the relationship between the police and the communities is damaged and needs to be fixed,” he said in a statement. “The officers have sworn to protect and serve and this horrible behavior can never be tolerated.”
A police spokesman, Captain Mark Mura, said on Friday that nine police officers responded to the scene, four of whom “were actively dealing with the 9-year-old boy”. One police officer was suspended and three others were placed on administrative leave, he said.
The officers responded to a “family problems” report, said Deputy Chief of Police Andre Anderson on Jan. 31. “The officers were told that a 9-year-old” girl “indicated that she wanted to kill herself and that she wanted to kill her mother” and that she initially tried to escape, Anderson said.
Footage released days after the incident shows authorities handcuffing the girl as she repeatedly screams for her father and refuses to get into the vehicle.
In the video, policemen can be heard saying they would spray her with pepper if she continued to resist.
The girl’s mother, Elba Pope, previously told NBC News that she called the police during an argument with her husband. Pope said he would sue the city and the police department. She filed a complaint notice.
“No one who would treat a 9-year-old like that should be on the police to help someone,” she said.
Her lawyer, Donald Thompson, said on Friday that Pope had seen the new video, which he described as “disturbing and abhorrent”, and that she was traumatized again.
Thompson said, “This leads us to question: what kind of adult do you think your only option in a situation like this is to spray pepper on a 9 year old child?”
“It’s more of the same,” he said. “It makes it much more clear that the Rochester Police Department has some significant problems with recruiting, hiring and training its officers and its ability to respond appropriately to potential mental health situations.”
