Police in Rochester, New York, have come under fire again after footage of the body showed an officer injecting a nine-year-old girl with a handcuff.
The video released by police showed the girl being restrained after officers were called to a family rally on Friday. The girl screamed crying and said, “I want my dad,” and was sitting in the back seat when a male officer told his colleague, “Just spray her at this point.”
Police continue the pepper spray of the nine-year-old, who shouts and shouts, “Please wipe my eyes.” An officer then closes the door to the car. The video shows that there were at least seven officers.
Rochester police were already under scrutiny in March 2020 over the death of a mentally ill black man. Daniel Prude, 41, died when he suffocated after officers put a hood over his head and pushed his head to the sidewalk for two minutes.
Rochester police released body camera footage six months after Prude’s death after his family sued the city. The incident sparked national protests. The police chief was fired.
Regarding the Friday incident, Rochester deputy police chief Andre Anderson said officers were told the girl “indicated that she wanted to kill herself and that she wanted to kill her mother”.
Anderson told reporters officers chased the girl as she tried to flee. Police decided to take the nine-year-old to hospital, but Anderson said the girl refused to get into a police car.
“It did not seem like 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.”
The video shows officers wrestling with the nine-year-old in the snow. At one point, an officer says, “You act like a child.”
The girl replied, “I am a child.”
Rochester Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan said: ‘I’m not going to stand here and tell you it’s okay to spray a nine year old pepper. We are going to do the work we need to do to ensure that these kinds of things do not happen. ”
However, the president of Rochester’s police union defended the officers involved.
‘[The officer] made a decision there which in his opinion was the best action to take. “It did not hurt her,” Mike Mazzeo, president of the Rochester Police Locust Club, told reporters. “If they had to go further and use more force, chances are she could have been hurt worse.”
Mazzeo added: “It’s very difficult to find someone like that in the back of a police car.”
Lovely Warren, mayor of Rochester, said the video as a mother of a ten-year-old daughter ‘is nothing you want to see’.
In a statement, Warren added: “I am deeply concerned about the weaning and handcuffing of a child who is in distress and clearly emotional.”