The 9-year-old black girl was handcuffed in the backseat of a police car, distraught and crying for her father as the white officers grew impatient as they tried to squeeze her completely into the vehicle.
“This is your last chance,” an officer warned. “Otherwise, pepper spray will go into your eyeballs.”
Less than 90 seconds later, the girl was sprayed and screamed, “Please wipe my eyes! Please wipe my eyes! “
What began with a report of ‘family problems’ in Rochester, New York, and ended with police treating a fourth-grader as a suspect, has sparked outrage as the latest example of law enforcement assault on black people.
While the US is undergoing a new bill of police brutality and racial injustice after George Floyd’s death last May, the girl’s treatment illustrates how even young children are not exempt.
Research shows that black children are often thought of as older than they are, and are more likely to be seen as threatening or dangerous. Proponents have long said that this leads to the police treating them in ways they wouldn’t think of treating white children. In some cases, it has resulted in fatalities, such as the murder of Tamir Rice, a black 12-year-old who was shot by a white police officer in Cleveland in 2014.
“Black children have never had the opportunity to be children,” said Kristin Henning, law professor and director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law.
A study published in the journal Pediatrics in late 2020 found that black children and teens were six times as likely to die from police gunfire as white children. It analyzed data on police use of force in situations involving young people between the ages of 12 and 17 from 2003 to 2018.
“Black children were seen as genuinely older, more culpable, less prone to rehabilitation and less worthy of Western notions of innocence and Western notions of childhood,” said Henning.
The Rochester headlines were very personal to Mando Avery, whose 7-year-old son was hit by pepper spray from a police officer aiming at someone else during a protest 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 is now afraid of the police. Little things can bring up bad memories, like using a spray bottle to do his hair.
“Their innocence fades much, much sooner,” Avery said. “What kind of tantrum causes a child to be handcuffed?”
In the Rochester case, the girl’s mother called the police on Jan. 29 after an argument with her husband and said she asked officers to call mental health services when her daughter became increasingly upset.
But the police camera video shows only officers on the scene, first handcuffing the girl’s hands behind her back and then growing impatient as they tried to get her into the police car, culminating in the pepper spray.
There is a point in the video where an officer says, “You act like a kid!” to which the girl replies, “I am a child!”
The agents have been suspended pending an investigation. More video footage released On Thursday it turned out to be waiting for an ambulance to arrive for the girl.
The case comes months after the high-profile death last spring of Daniel Prude, a black man who was going through a mental health crisis when his family called Rochester police. Officers handcuffed him, then put a hood over his head when he spat at them. As he struggled, they pressed him face down to the ground, with an officer pushing his head on the sidewalk until he stopped breathing.
The 9-year-old girl’s mother, Elba Pope, told The Associated Press that she didn’t think the white officers saw her daughter in the same way as a white child.
“If they’d looked at her like one of their children, they wouldn’t have sprayed her with pepper,” she said.
Henning agreed. “This is where the issue of race comes into play,” she said. “If that kid looked like one of their little girls, looked like the little kid they put in bed, it was much less likely they would have.”
The president of the Rochester Police Association has said that the officers were not lacking in sympathy, but were dealing with a difficult situation with limited resources and followed departmental protocol.
New York isn’t the only place where police treatment of black children has been a focal point.
In a suburb of Denver, Four black girls aged 6 to 17 were arrested by police at gunpoint after being wrongly suspected of being in a stolen car last year.
An agent tried handcuffing the 6-year-old, who wore a tiara for what was supposed to be a girls’ day out with her relatives, but the cuffs were too big, 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 floor at a pool party in 2015. Later that year, a sheriff’s deputy at a South Carolina school knocked a girl to the floor and dragged her through a classroom after she refused to hand in her cell phone during math class.
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 phone call and shot him within seconds. When his 14-year-old sister ran to the scene, she was pushed to the floor and handcuffed. The agents were not charged.
It’s that story that makes Christian Gibbs, a black father of three daughters, grateful that the girl in Rochester wasn’t more seriously injured – and angry, that’s even a concern.
“Thank goodness she wasn’t murdered. … And the fact that we have to say that is already an indictment of the kind of treatment we expect to be distributed, even to small children, ”said Gibbs, 46, of Bowie, Maryland.
Holly M. Frye, of South Ogden, Utah, said she has almost daily conversations with her three children about how to behave 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 always talk about it.”
Although there is little data on the interactions of very young children with the police, according to one analysis, black youths are nearly five times more likely to be held in prison than white youths. by the non-profit organization The Sentencing Project.
The incarceration rate for white youth is 83 per 100,000; for black youth that number jumps to 383, The Sentencing Project discovered. While that’s partly due to differences in insult, studies have shown that teens of color are more likely to be arrested and more likely to have serious consequences compared to their white peers, the report said.
And it is not just police and justice. Black students are more likely to be banned and expelled from school, says Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, which fights structural racism.
It’s “the way our black kids are questioned by adults, with the underlying assumption that they can’t be believed, they can’t be trusted, and they’re always doing something wrong,” she said.
That leads to trauma and mistrust on the part of the black youth of the authorities around them, she said.
“There is no ‘Officer Friendly’ for black kids,” she said.
Hajela reported from Essex County, New Jersey, Whitehurst reported from Salt Lake City. Carolyn Thompson, Associated Press writer in Buffalo, New York, contributed to this report.
Hajela is part of The Associated Press’s Race and Ethnicity reporting team.