Newly released bodycam videos show Rochester agents pepper spraying a 9-year-old girl in upstate New York.
Footage from a video shot during a family dispute on Friday shows the distraught youth running away from the police and then falling onto the snow-covered ground while a cop tries to bring her back.
“I want my dad”, the girl shouts in a second video. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I want my dad … I don’t get in the car until I see my dad. “
“Stop,” says an officer.
“Wait, can I please take the snow off me,” she shouts. ‘I want my father. Wait, I just want to see my dad, please. For the last time…. I demand.”
“Stop or you will be hurt,” one officer replies at one point during the protracted ordeal.
A female cop tells the girl she will find her father, but asks her to get in the police car to keep warm – only to make the girl scream again.
“Just spray her at this point,” one officer says finally, and he is seen spraying the girl.
“Please wipe my eyes,” the girl shouts. “Wipe my eyes, please.”
The footage was released Sunday after a press conference in the city in which Rochester Deputy Police Chief Andre Anderson said the girl was suicidal.
“She indicated that she wanted to kill herself and that she wanted to kill her mother,” he said, according to a report in the Democrat & Chronicle.
Nine police cars responded to the call, the police said.
The girl’s mother, who was also not identified, can be seen in the images arguing with her daughter, who keeps getting agitated as her mother berates her.
The woman also swears at passing motorists.
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you it’s okay for a 9-year-old to be sprayed with pepper spray,” Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan said on Sunday. “It’s not.”
“I don’t see that as who we are as a department,” said the chief. “And we’re going to do the work we have to do to make sure things like this don’t happen.”
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said she was disturbed by the video.
“I am very concerned about how this young girl was treated by our police,” Warren said at the press conference. “The video clearly shows that we need to do more to support our children and families.”