Footage Shows US Girl, 9, Handcuffed And Pepper-Sprayed, Cops Suspended

The city of Rochester, N.Y., has suspended the police officers involved in handcuffing and pepper-spraying a 9-year-old girl last week, officials said Monday, addressing an incident that has brought renewed scrutiny to an already-embattled department.

The city has not named the officers or said how many have been suspended, but the disciplinary measures will last at least until the completion of an internal investigation, Rochester spokesman Justin Roj said.

The suspensions come one day after police released body-camera footage of the Friday encounter, which shows officers using force against a young girl in distress while they responded to a "family trouble" call.

"What happened Friday was simply horrible, and has rightly outraged all of our community," Mayor Lovely Warren, a Democrat, said in a statement announcing the suspensions.

Criticism spread quickly in Rochester, a city of more than 200,000 in Upstate New York, where residents were unhappy with police for their treatment of Daniel Prude, who died last year after officers put a hood over his head.

On Monday evening, protesters marched through frigid weather, demanding accountability. Outside police headquarters, they rattled a fence and chanted: "Look what you did, you just Maced a little kid."

The death of Prude, a Black man who was mentally ill, highlighted two issues that advocates across the country have long pushed departments to address: police treatment of Black Americans and their response to mental health crises. In response, Warren fired the police chief and the city launched a new team of counselors and social workers to answer emergency calls for people "experiencing emotional or behavioral turmoil."

The newly released videos, activists say, show that not enough has changed.

The Friday incident began about 3:20 p.m. Police who responded were told that the 9-year-old girl, who has not been identified, was suicidal.

The footage shows the officers chasing and restraining the girl. In one video, she's sobbing and struggling against the cuffs as officers try to force her into a patrol car. The officers chide her, and one tells her that she's "acting like a child." She responds: "I am a child" and pleads with them to stop forcing her into the car.

Minutes later, video shows an officer pepper-spraying the girl, leaving her crying in the back seat. "Unbelievable," says the officer who sprayed her.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, called the episode "heartbreaking." "This isn't how the police should treat anyone, let alone a 9-year-old girl," he said in a statement.

Cuomo said Rochester must "reckon with a real police accountability problem, and this alarming incident demands a full investigation that sends a message this behavior won't be tolerated."

It is another example of police treating people in the midst of mental health crises as criminals, said activists who have questioned why officers responded to the scene and not the city's new "person in crisis" team (PIC).

Roj, the city spokesman, said the call originally came in as a "domestic" crime report. The girl's mother reported that the girl's father stole her car, Roj said. When police arrived, the mother told officers that her daughter was distraught and had threatened to harm herself and her mother, he added.

"The PIC team wouldn't have been called there," said Roj, using the acronym for the new mental health crisis response team. "It did not come in as a mental health call."

The program is in its nascent stages, Roj said, and there's no system in place to send the team's mental health counselors to a police call. Instead, a person in crisis can call 911 and request mental health services for themselves, while a caller seeking help for someone else must call 211, the area's crisis hotline number.

The PIC team has 14 staffers and has responded to about 40 calls since it began operating on Jan. 21, Roj said.

The officers responding to the call, he said, did have the option to call Monroe County's forensic intervention team, which dispatches mental health clinicians to crisis calls.

Warren told the department to complete "a thorough investigation" into the matter and to review whether policies and procedures relating to such mental health calls had changed.

Stanley Martin, with the Rochester community activist group Free the People Roc, said that many residents did not know that the program was not yet fully up and running. She said the city has not done enough to communicate that.

"These restrictions should have been highlighted and the public should have been aware they are in certain phases of implementing the program," Martin said.

She said local programs such as the PIC are often underfunded and have not delivered on their promised goals.

"As you dig, you're going to find that these programs sound good," Martin said. "But they're not fully staffed and when people actually call them for help, they don't show up."

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)