Opinion by Editorial Board
ROCHESTER, N.Y., police became the object of national opprobrium last year after videos surfaced showing the brutal treatment of a Black man who had been suffering from a psychotic episode. He was naked, with a mesh hood placed over his face and his head pressed into the pavement until he lost consciousness. The 41-year-old man died a week later. In the aftermath, the police chief and the entire command staff were fired or resigned, and reforms were said to have been put in place. It is clear, though, that a whole lot of lessons were not learned. How else to explain the phalanx of police officers who handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a 9-year-old girl?
Police body-camera footage of the Jan. 29 event shows officers, who had responded to a family disturbance call, restraining the girl, pushing her into the snow to handcuff her and pepper-spraying her when she refused to sit inside the patrol car. The girl, who is Black, screamed repeatedly for her father, and at one point an officer said, “You’re acting like a child” to which she said, “I am a child.”
Release of the body-cam video, which to the city’s credit came 48 hours after the incident and not months later as occurred when Daniel Prude died from complications of asphyxia, sparked outrage, suspension of the officers involved pending investigation and introduction of legislation that would ban use of pepper spray on children. Okay. But how can it require a state law to make clear that it is not acceptable to pepper-spray children? Even after the event, a police union official was trying to justify the officers’ actions.
The problem is that police did not view this little Black girl as a child. She was clearly in trouble. She posed no danger. She needed to be calmed and helped, not handcuffed and pepper-sprayed. One has to ask — even as the answer is clear — if police would have handled the situation differently if the 9-year-old had been White and blond. It is the same question that should be asked of the White, male school resource officer in Kissimmee, Fla., who body-slammed a 16-year-old Black female student to the ground. Or the police officer in Texas who tackled, dragged and pinned to the ground a 15-year-old Black girl who had been at a pool party. Research shows that Black girls are treated more harshly — suspended from school, placed in restraints, arrested — than White girls for the same kind of infractions.
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said watching the video reminded her of her own 10-year-old daughter. “I can tell you that this video, as a mother, is not anything that you want to see,” said Ms. Warren. It is not anything that any of us, as Americans, should have to see.
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1 comment. Leave new
There are very good police, my son was one, and there are a very few police who are bad. The same is true with our lawyers and doctors and building inspectors, etc. The problem is that the good police do not hold the bad police accountable. Those who are in whatever occupation do not want to criticize their own because they are afraid the line of acceptable behavior will move too far towards them. The same was true in Vietnam. Many Vietnam veterans still try to justify the mass murders of My Lai. In my unit in Vietnam two soldiers accidentally, but very, very carelessly, shot a four year old boy in the stomach. We got the boy immediately on a helicopter and to one of our hospitals and he lived. However, the two American soldiers were not punished other than they were both reduced in rank. They were not punished because the officers did not want to limit our need to fire our weapons. There were times we had to start firing, but the incident with the four year old boy was totally uncalled for.