Rochester, New York – Rochester police on Sunday released two body camera videos of officers holding a distraught 9-year-old girl handcuffed and sprayed with what police called a chemical “ irritant. ”
The Democrat and Chronicle reported that the mayor of Rochester, Lovely Warren, expressed concern about the “child harmed in Friday’s incident” prior to the release of the videos.
“I have a 10-year-old child, so she’s a kid, she’s a baby. This video, as a mom, isn’t all you want to see,” Warren continued.
Warren told a news conference on Sunday that she had spoken to the girl’s mother “from one mother to another,” reports CBS Rochester affiliated with WROC-TV.
She told reporters she is “very concerned about how this young girl was treated by our police,” the agency added.
A total of nine officers and supervisors responded to the report of “family problems” on Friday. The girl can be heard in the body camera videos of officers on the ground screaming frantically for her father as the officers try to restrain her.
At the press conference Sunday, Deputy Police Chief Andre Anderson described the girl as suicidal.
“She indicated that she wanted to kill herself and that she wanted to kill her mother,” he said.
Officers tried to force the girl into a patrol car, but she drove off and kicked them. In a statement on Saturday, police said that the action “required” an officer to bring the girl to the ground. Then the department said, “for the safety of the minor and at the request of the caring parent on site,” the child was handcuffed and placed in the back of a police car while they waited for an ambulance to arrive.
Police said the girl ignored orders to put her feet in the car. An officer was then “required” to spray an “irritant” in the handcuffed girl’s face, the department said Saturday.
On the video from WROC, an officer can be heard saying, “Just spray her at this point.”
She has heard screams and an officer says, “I have her. I have her.”
At Sunday’s press conference, Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan described the irritant as pepper spray. She refused to defend the officers’ actions.
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you it’s okay for a 9-year-old to be sprayed with pepper spray. It’s not,” said Herriott-Sullivan. “I don’t see that as who we are as a department, and we’re going to do the work we need to do to make sure things like this don’t 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.
Rochester police have been under scrutiny since the death of Daniel Prude last year after officers from the department put a hood over his head and put his face on the sidewalk.