The city’s mayor said in a statement a video from a body camera showing a Rochester police officer spraying a mother with a child late last month.
A statement from the Rochester Police Department said officers were responding on February 22 to a call from a suspected female shoplifter, “who was arguing with shopkeepers and refusing to leave”.
A video with a body camera shows an officer talking to a woman with her child as she shows the contents of her purse, takes off a loose diaper and says she did not take anything from the pharmacy. When the officer told her that he was going to see store staff, but she had to stay with him, she ran with her child. In the video, police dulled the child’s face.
An officer chases her down, puts her on the ground and tries to handcuff her while she cries: ‘I did not steal anything’, and the child cries in the background.
According to a statement from Rochester police, the woman was sprayed with pepper during the arrest.
Police were not sprayed or injured. The woman is charged with trespassing.
Rochester interim police chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan said on Friday: “You will see where the mother and child are actually grabbing each other.”
The chief indicated that it was her initial response that the use of force was unpolished.
“Some things for me are not so simple or a policy has been followed. We point out that it was,” she said.
“If the person physically resists, you are generally safe with pepper spray uses,” she said. “You just want to go to the extent necessary. You do not want to go beyond that.”
According to police, the officer in question was placed on administrative leave while an internal investigation is underway.
A subsequent video from a body camera shows an officer later addressing the woman as ‘dear’ and asking her if she does not want to rinse her eyes, telling her that she may be on the news later because at least one bystander was filming.
Mayor Lovely Warren said in a statement that the videos of the body of the incident were “definitely disturbing.”
“When such incidents occur, I am relieved that I have made sure that cameras are carried by body carriers by our police so that we can see what is happening in our streets and hold officers accountable,” she said.
Herriott-Sullivan “is working to change comprehensive, but essential, policies and procedures, along with mandatory training for officers regarding racism and implicit prejudice,” Warren said. “Change comes only after we have the ability to hold our officers accountable if they violate the public’s trust.”
The incident occurred about a month after one of the Rochester police officers was suspended and two placed on administrative leave after a video was released in which authorities sprayed a 9-year-old girl with pepper spray while responding to a report of ‘family problems’, officials said.
Camera of the body showed police handcuffing the girl as she repeatedly shouted at her father and refused to get into the vehicle. “You act like a child,” one of the officers told her at one point.
‘I’m a child’, she can be heard reacting.
In this video, officers can be heard saying that they would spray her pepper if she continued to resist. And then one does.
In a statement released Friday, the City of Rochester Police Accountability Board said two officers at the scene of the latest arrest were also at the scene during the child’s earlier pepper spray incident. It is not clear what role they played in both incidents.
‘The Board’s Liability Board is upset by what it has seen,’ reads the board’s statement, adding that there is a “disturbing parallel between the two incidents.
“Both incidents involved black mothers. Both involved black children. Both obviously involved black people in a crisis. Both involved officers who used pepper spray on or around a black child,” the police responsibility statement said. .
The statement said the videos on the body released by police at the February 22 incident showed an officer telling a bystander to “stop and get out of here.”
In the incident on February 22, an officer holding the child also told another to use a car to block the child from witnesses and said it did not look good that he should restrain a three-year-old.
One officer did say that the family and crisis intervention team had been appealed to, but another replied that ‘they said they had not even been reported yet’, according to the police’s responsibility council.
Both incidents “apparently did not involve the person in a crisis team, the family and crisis intervention team or mental health workers. Both police officers did nothing to exacerbate the situation effectively,” the statement said. “Both apparently intimidated with bystanders who filmed the incident. Without the courage of bystanders who were willing to stand up and hold the police accountable, both incidents were never brought to light.”
The confrontations come less than a year after Daniel Prude, 41, died while being restrained by Rochester police with a ‘spit hood’ over his head.
Police found Prude wandering naked in the street after allegedly breaking a window, and he could be seen on camera footage spitting in the direction of officers and hearing him say he was infected with coronavirus. Officers said it led to them using the hood.
The head of the police department and all the commando staff resigned after Prude’s death, and the city introduced reforms of law enforcement, including the removal of the crisis intervention from the police.
The city launched a response team for a person in crisis, but it did not respond to the incident with the 9-year-old because the initial 911 call did not justify it, Warren said.
Herriott-Sullivan said at the Friday press conference that it was considered as such as it was a call about a crime.
“In this case, keep in mind, there were criminal charges pushed by the victims, which is Rite-Aid,” Herriott-Sullivan said. ‘FACIT’s [Family And Crisis Intervention Team] will not be useful when processed. This is not a time for that. The time is followed up later. ‘