Rochester police officers were reportedly suspended for their alleged involvement in a Friday incident in which an upset 9-year-old girl was handcuffed and sprayed with pepper spray.
The announcement was made Monday in a press conference by the city’s director of communications, Justin Roj, reports the Democrat and Chronicle.
The officers involved in the Friday incident were not named. Their suspensions take effect immediately and will continue pending an internal investigation.
Rochester police on Sunday released two body camera videos of officers calling the chemical ‘irritating’, and being sprayed with what police call a chemical.
GRAPHIC LANGUAGE WARNING
The Democrat and Chronicle reported that prior to the release of the videos, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren had expressed her concern about the ‘child suffering damage during this incident that happened on Friday’.
“I have a 10-year-old child, so she’s a child, she’s a baby. This video, as a mother, is not something you want to see,” Warren added.
A total of nine officers and supervisors responded to the report of ‘family problems’ on Friday. The girl can be heard in the camera videos of officers at the scene shouting furiously at her father while the officers try to restrain her.
Andre Anderson, deputy police chief, described the girl as suicide during a news conference on Sunday.
“She indicated she wanted to kill herself and she wanted to kill her mother,” he said.
Officers tried to force the girl into a patrol car, but she pulled away and kicked at them. In a statement Saturday, the police department said an officer must hire an officer to take the girl to the ground. Then the department said, “for the safety of the minor and at the request of the supervising parent at the scene,” the child was handcuffed and put in the back of a police car while waiting for an ambulance.
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Police said the girl disobeyed orders to put her feet in the car. An officer was then ‘forced’ to inject an ‘irritation’ into the handcuffed girl’s face, the department said on Saturday.
At Sunday’s news conference, Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan, police chief, described the irritation as pepper spray. She did not want to defend the actions of the officers.
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you that it’s okay to spray a 9 – year – old pepper. It is not,” Herriott-Sullivan said. “I do not see it as who we are as a department, and we are going to do the work we need to do to ensure that these kinds of things do not happen.”
Police said the girl was eventually taken to Rochester General Hospital, ‘where she received the services and care she needed’, and was later released to her family.
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The Rochester Police Department has been investigating since the death of Daniel Prude last year, after department officials put a hood over his head and pushed his face into the sidewalk.
Associated Press contributed to this report.