Officials in Rochester, N.Y., said Tuesday that they expect to release additional police body camera footage involving the officers who handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a 9-year-old girl, a case that is sparking outrage over how law enforcement agencies respond to people who might be having an emotional or mental health episode.
Two videos of the incident were released over the weekend, followed by the suspension of three officers. City spokesman Justin Roj said police officials are in custody of other footage that it hopes to release in the “coming days.”
“We are in the process of redacting the other footage and hope to release it as soon as possible,” Roj said, adding that the girl’s mother has requested that “identifiable” characteristics be removed from the footage before it is made public.
The footage that was released Monday shows officers chasing and restraining the girl after her mother, who is Black but has not been identified, told them the girl was suicidal and threatened to harm her. The girl was sobbing as officers tried to force her into a patrol car. The video then shows an officer pepper-spraying the girl, who was handcuffed.
On Tuesday, lawmakers, child-welfare experts and social justice advocates said the video highlights the need for major changes to police departments’ training and standards for responding to calls involving mental illness, especially in Rochester.
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren had committed to overhaul the department this summer in the aftermath of the death of Daniel Prude, who died last year after officers fitted him with a “spit hood,” used to protect police from detainees’ bodily fluids.
Prude, who was Black, was also suffering a mental health crisis at the time. The seven officers at the scene of Prude’s arrest remain suspended with pay pending the outcome of multiple investigations. The city’s police chief and several top deputies also resigned in September after video of Prude’s arrest was released.
“I view this incident as a direct result of the officers in the Prude case never really being held responsible,” said Ashley Gantt, founder of Free the People Roc, a Rochester-based social justice organization. “We did get a new police chief, but if we don’t change the culture of policing, and we just change the front of policing, we are going to end up with the same problems as we saw in this case.”
After Prude’s death, Warren and other city leaders unveiled a series of changes that included a “People in Crisis” team that police dispatchers are supposed to deploy to calls involving a person suspected of suffering from mental illness. But Rochester said the team was not deployed in the case of the 9-year-old girl because her mother’s initial call was related to a stolen car. It remains unclear why officers did not later request that the crisis team or other mental health experts respond to the scene.
Donna Lieberman, the president of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said her office also had requested in October that Rochester leaders invest in the creation of a “crisis call center staffed by behavioral health experts” as an alternative to 911 and expand its use of mobile crisis response teams.
But Lieberman said the suggested overhauls have still not been implemented, which she blames on a lack of funding from state leaders, as well as Rochester leaders’ failure to sustain the push for change in wake of Prude’s death.
“What we have seen time and time again, in response to police wrongdoing, is half-measures,” Lieberman said. “Right now, in Rochester, as in too many places around the nation, the police remain the go-to first responders for so many issues, and that is just outside their expertise and their purview.”
Roj, the mayor’s spokesman, noted that the city was transparent by quickly telling the public about the incident involving the girl but added that “reform is a difficult process” that requires “persistent efforts to make the necessary changes.”
“You are dealing with institutions and systematic issues,” Roj said. “I think we all want it to happen faster, but I think the mayor has worked toward that.”
But national experts on policing said they are baffled by the officers’ actions in Friday’s incident.
Ron Bruno, a 25-year police veteran and executive director of Crisis Intervention Training International, said he has placed large male suspects in the back of his patrol car using less force than the Rochester officers used on the 9-year-old.
“There were three officers; could they not have contained the child? I don’t see what the urgency was,” said Bruno, whose organization provides training to officers in ways to help people in mental distress. “I watched some of the videos and I don’t see them using any de-escalation techniques.”
Debbie Plotnick, a vice president at Mental Health America, added the tactics the officers used were the opposite of how law enforcement should approach someone in mental distress – particularly a child.
Plotnick, who has worked with police departments for decades, said that once the officers were able to get the girl outside of the house and saw she was unarmed, they should have called for help from the newly formed PIC team.
“They didn’t. They didn’t call for proper backup,” she said. “That’s why six police cars ended up coming and it ended the way it did.”
Plotnick says she is impressed with the new programs the department has created and wants to credit them for these efforts.
However, she said the Friday incident illustrates why every police officer needs specialized training to help people in crisis. Sometimes they are the first to arrive. Sometimes the unit of mental health experts are not readily available.
“They are trained on how to talk to them, how to calm them down. The main thing they learn is to take as much time as needed,” Plotnik said. “It is not about hurrying up and getting them transported.”
Plotnik added she doubts Prude’s death and the pepper-spraying of 9-year-old were “isolated instances, especially with regard to race.”
“These are not disparate anecdotes,” Plotnik said. “The bias is that Black people, including children, are dangerous. The outcome is that they end up severely injured if not dead.”
Last week, a disturbing video showing a white, male school resource police officer body slamming a Black female student in Kissimmee, Fla., surfaced. The student’s family is pushing for the officer to be fired and have hired veteran civil rights attorney Ben Crump.
A Washington Post database shows that the mentally ill people who died by police gunfire since 2015 were largely white, accounting for 58 percent of the deaths, with Blacks at 16 percent and Latinos at 13 percent.
Men with mental health problems were far more likely to be fatally shot by police than women, accounting for 94 percent of the deaths.
In Rochester, where allegations of racial injustice have plagued the police department for decades, voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum in 2019 to create a citizen Police Accountability Board.
The board was officially empaneled last year, but a key piece of its authority – where it can directly discipline police officers – is tied up in court after the local police sought an injunction.
Shani Wilson, the board chairwoman, said she nonetheless expects that the board will investigate the conduct of the officers involved in the 9-year-old girl’s case.
“We need to be looking at the policies that allowed this to happen,” Wilson said. “And I think it’s fair to say we will not be recommending the use of any chemical weapon of any kind on any minor, at all, ever.”
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