The Rochester Police Department in New York on Sunday released footage of the body showing officers handcuffing a 9-year-old girl and spraying pepper while responding to a call for ‘family problems’.
The two disturbing videos show the emergency child screaming at her father while officers tried to restrain her and put her in a police vehicle on Friday afternoon.
“You act like a child,” one male officer heard her tell in the video.
“I’m a kid,” she shouts.
“I will spray you pepper and do not want to,” a female officer told the girl as she tried to put her in the police car.
“This is your last chance. Otherwise, pepper spray will go into your eyeballs,” the officer said.
The girl, whose face is blurred in the videos, begs the officers not to spray her. After she was pepper spray, she cried, “It went in my eyes, it went in my eyes.”
Officials did not identify the child, her family or any officers involved in the incident.
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you that a 9-year-old pepper spray should be OK,” Rochester Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan told a news conference on Sunday. “It’s not. I do not see that this is who we are as a department. ‘
The incident has re-investigated a police department whose top officials resigned last September after protests over the death of Daniel Prude, a black man who died of suffocation after Rochester officers put a hood over his head and pinned him to the ground.
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said the incident Friday is not something any of us should want to justify.
She said the young girl reminded her of her own daughter.
“I have a ten-year-old daughter. So she’s a child. She’s a baby,” Warren said. “And I can tell you that this video as a mother is nothing you want to see.”
“I saw my baby’s face in her face,” she says in an emotional appeal for compassion and empathy for the way police officers behave in the community.
Warren said she had asked the chief of police to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the incident, adding that she welcomed a review by the Police Accountability Board.
Officers who responded to a report of ‘family problems’ at around 15:21 local time on Friday were made aware that the 9-year-old girl was’ upset’ and ‘suicidal’ and indicated that she ‘wanted to kill herself and that she wanted to kill her mother, ‘Rochester deputy police chief Andre Anderson said Sunday.
The body camera video shows a male officer chasing the girl, wearing a hoodie with colorful leggings and a backpack as she tries to run away.
While the officer is trying to calm the girl down, she gets into a heated argument with her mother over a family dispute. The officer then asks the mother to leave.
Anderson said the officer decided to “remove the child from the situation and put her in a car where we could help her.”
But the young girl refused, he said, and ‘knocked around’, at one point kicking an officer in the chest and knocking down a camera carried by the body.
The video shows officers struggling to restrain the child as she repeatedly exclaims, “I want my dad.”
The officers then handcuff the child while she is on the snow-covered ground and try to get her to sit inside the police vehicle.
“I just want to see my father, please,” the child begged, asking a “girl officer.”
The video from the second body camera shows the female officer trying to calm the child down and get her legs in the car, promising that she will try to find her father.
After unsuccessful attempts, the officer warns the sobbing girl that she will spray her pepper if she does not comply.
One male officer says, “Just spray her. Just spray her at this point.”
The female officer is seen shaking a can; a glance is also seen in the other officer’s hand. It is unclear who sprayed the child with pepper spray.
“It did not appear that she was resisting the officers. “She tried not to be restrained from going to the hospital,” Anderson said. “As officers made numerous attempts to get her into the car, an officer sprayed the young child with OC spray to get her into the car.”
She was subsequently transported to Rochester General Hospital and later released.
Anderson said he was not trying to make excuses for what happened, and that changes would occur by “actually talking to the officials involved and letting them look at budding.”
“Our overall goal is to change the culture,” he said.
The National Suicide Prevention Rescue Buoy is 1-800-273-8255. Other international suicide hotlines can be found at befrienders.org. You can also send TALK to 741741 for free, anonymous US 24/7 crisis support from the Crisis Text Line.