The 9-year-old black girl sat handcuffed in the back seat of a police car, upset and crying at her father, while the white officers became increasingly impatient as they tried to bend her completely into the vehicle.
“This is your last chance,” one official warned. “Otherwise, pepper spray will go into your eyeballs.”
Less than 90 seconds later, the girl was spray-painted and shouted, ‘Wipe my eyes! Please wipe my eyes! ”
What began with a report on ‘family problems’ in Rochester, New York, and ended with the police’s treatment of a fourth-grader as a crime suspect, has sparked outrage as the latest example of black people being abused against the law enforcement.
As the U.S. undergoes a new bill on police brutality and racial injustice after George Floyd’s death in May last year, the treatment of the girl illustrates how even young children are not released.
Research shows that black children are often older than they are, and that they are likely to be seen as threatening or dangerous. Lawyers have long said that this leads to the police treating them in ways they would not dream of treating white children. In some cases, it has led to deaths such as the murder of Tamir Rice, a black 12-year-old who was shot in 2014 by a white police officer in Cleveland.
“Black children have never had their chance to be children,” said Kristin Henning, law professor and director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law.
A study published late in the journal Pediatrics found that black children and teens were six times more likely to die from a police gunshot than white children. It analyzed data on police violence abuse in situations involving young people between the ages of 12 and 17 from 2003 to 2018.
“Black children are really seen as older, more guilty, less susceptible to rehabilitation and less worthy of Western views on innocence and Western views on childhood,” Henning said.
The Rochester news was very personal to Mando Avery, whose 7-year-old son was hit by pepper spray from a police officer who aimed at someone else during a rally in Seattle last summer. The spray left his son’s face and chest painful and swollen from chemical burns for several days, and even required a visit to the emergency room.
He has had nightmares ever since and now fears the police. Small things can evoke bad memories, such as using a spray bottle to do his hair.
“Their innocence disappears much, much sooner,” Avery said. “What kind of outbursts of anger lead to captivating a child?”
In the Rochester case, the girl’s mother called police on Jan. 29 after an altercation with her husband and said she asked officers to call mental health services when her daughter became increasingly upset.
But on the scene of the police camera, only officers appear on the scene, who first handcuffed the girl’s hands behind her back, and became increasingly impatient when they tried to land her in the police car, which ended up on the pepper spray. .
There’s a point in the video when an officer says, ‘You’re acting like a kid!’ to which the girl replies, “I am a child!”
The officers were suspended pending an investigation. More video material released Thursday waited until an ambulance arrived for the girl.
The case comes months after the sensational death last year of Daniel Prude, a black man who went through a mental health crisis when his family called Rochester police. Officers handcuffed him and then put a hood over his head as he spat on them. While he was struggling, they pinned him face down on the ground, and one officer pushed his head toward the sidewalk until he stopped breathing.
The mother of the 9-year-old girl, Elba Pope, told The Associated Press she did not think the white officers saw her daughter in the same way they would have seen a white child.
“If they had looked at her as if she were one of their children, they would not have sprayed her with pepper,” she said.
Henning agreed. “This is where the issue of race comes into play,” she said. “If that child looked like one of their little girls, like the baby they put in bed, it’s much less likely they would have done it.”
The president of the Rochester Police Department said the officers did not have compassion but that they were dealing with a difficult situation with limited resources and following the department’s protocol.
New York is not the only place where the treatment of black children by the police has been a flashpoint.
In suburban Denver, four black girls aged 6 to 17 were detained by police with guns after being wrongly suspected in a stolen car last year.
One officer tried to handcuff the 6-year-old, who was wearing a tiara for a girl’s day out with her family members, but the handcuffs were too large according to a lawsuit filed by the family.
In North Texas, a white police officer was videotaped pushing a swimsuit-clad black girl to the ground during a pool party in 2015. Later that same year, a sheriff’s deputy at a school in South Carolina dragging a girl to the floor and dragging her across a classroom after she refused to hand over her cell phone in math classes.
In the case of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old was playing with a toy gun in November 2014 when Cleveland police responded to a call and shot him within seconds. When her 14-year-old sister ran to the scene, she was pushed to the ground and handcuffed. The officers were not charged.
It’s the story that makes Christian Gibbs, a black father of three daughters, grateful that the girl in Rochester was not more seriously injured – and angry that it’s even worrying.
“Thank God she was not killed. “And the fact that we have to say it is already an accusation of the type of treatment we expect to be given to young children,” said Gibbs, 46, of Bowie, Maryland.
Holly M. Frye, from South Ogden, Utah, said she had almost daily conversations with her three children about how to act around police officers, the same kind of conversations her parents had with her.
“This kind of aggression against the black race has always existed, it’s just being recorded now,” she said. “It’s a topic that never leaves our kitchen table, we’re constantly talking about it.”
Although there is scarce information on the interaction of many young children with the police, black youths are probably five times more incarcerated compared to white young people, according to an analysis. by the nonprofit The Sentencing Project.
The incarceration rate for white youth is 83 per 100,000; for black youths jumping to 383, The Sentencing Project found. Although partly due to differences in offense, studies have found that teens of color will be more likely to be arrested and that they will have more serious consequences compared to their white counterparts, the report said.
And it’s not just policing and the criminal justice system. Black students face higher suspension and suspension rates, said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, which fights structural racism.
This is ‘the way our black children are questioned by adults, with the underlying assumption that they should not believe, and that they cannot be trusted and that they are always doing something wrong’, she said.
This leads to trauma and mistrust of the black youth towards the authorities around them, she said.
“There is no ‘officer friendly’ for black children,” she said.
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Hajela reported from Essex County, New Jersey, Whitehurst reported from Salt Lake City. Associated Press author Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York, contributed to this report.
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Hajela is a member of the race and ethnicity reporting team at The Associated Press.