The nine-year-old black girl, handcuffed in the back seat of a police car, anguished and crying for her father, while white officers became increasingly impatient as they tried to drag her fully into the vehicle.
“This is your last chance,” one officer warned. “Otherwise, pepper sprays will get into your eyeballs.”
Less than 90 seconds later, the girl had been sprayed and shouted, “Please clean my eyes! Wipe my eyes, please! ”
What began with a report of “family problems” in Rochester, New York, and ended with police treating a fourth-grader student as a crime suspect, has spurred outrage as the latest example of bullying. the police against blacks.
As the United States suffers a new reckoning about police brutality and racial injustice after George Floyd’s death last May, the girl’s treatment illustrates how even young children are not exempt.
Research shows that black children are often considered older than them and are more likely to be threatened or dangerous. Advocates have long said this leads police to treat them in ways they would not dream of treating white children. In some cases, it has resulted in fatalities such as the murder of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy shot by a white police officer in Cleveland in 2014.
“Black children have never been given the opportunity to be children,” said Kristin Henning, a law professor and director of the Georgetown Law Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative.
A study published in the journal Pediatrics in late 2020 found that black children and adolescents were six times more likely to die from police shooting than white children. Data on the use of police force in situations involving 12- to 17-year-olds from 2003 to 2018 were analyzed.
“Black children have been considered really older, more guilty, less susceptible to rehabilitation, and less worthy of Western notions of innocence and Western notions of childhood,” Henning said.
The Rochester headlines were deeply personal to Mando Avery, whose 7-year-old son was hit by a pepper spray from a police officer aimed at another person during a protest in Seattle last summer. The spray left her son’s face and chest sore and swollen from chemical burns for several days, and even required an emergency room visit.
He has had nightmares since then and now fears the police. Small things can bring back bad memories, such as using a spray bottle to get your hair done.
“His innocence disappears long, long before,” Avery said. “What kind of rage leads to handcuffing a child?”
In the Rochester case, the girl’s mother called police Jan. 29 after an argument with her partner and said she asked officers to call mental health services when her daughter was upset. increasingly.
But the video from the police corps camera shows only the officers of the place, first handcuffing the girl’s hands on her back and then getting more and more impatient as they tried to take her to the police car, which culminated in pepper spray.
There’s a point in the video when an agent says, “You’re making a kid!” to which the girl replies, “I’m a boy!”
Officers have been suspended pending an investigation. More video images posted Thursday showed the wait until an ambulance arrived for the girl.
The case comes months after the famous death last spring of Daniel Prude, a black man suffering from a mental health crisis when his family called Rochester police. Officers handcuffed him, and then put a hood on his head when he spat at them. As he struggled, he was nailed face down to the ground, an officer pushing his head to the pavement until he stopped breathing.
The mother of the 9-year-old girl, Elba Pope, told The Associated Press that she did not believe white officers saw her daughter in the same way they would have seen a white boy.
“If they had seen her as if she were one of her children, they wouldn’t have sprinkled her with pepper,” he said.
Henning agreed. “This is where the issue of race comes into play,” he said. “If that boy had looked like one of his girls, it would have looked like the little boy they put to bed, it’s much less likely they would have done it.”
The president of the Rochester Police Union has said officers do not lack compassion, but face a difficult situation with limited resources and follow the department’s protocol.
New York is not the only place where police treatment against black children has been a turning point.
In Denver, on the outskirts, four black girls aged 6 to 17 were arrested by police at gunpoint after being mistakenly suspected of being in a stolen car last year.
An officer tried to handcuff the 6-year-old girl, who was wearing a tiara for what was supposed to be a girls ’day with her relatives, but the fists were too big, according to a lawsuit filed by the family.
North Texas, a white police officer was recorded in a video pushing a black girl in a swimsuit on the floor during a pool party in 2015. Later that same year, an assistant sheriff at a South Carolina school he threw a girl to the ground and dragged her through a classroom after he refused to hand over his cell phone to the math class.
In the case of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old was playing with a toy gun in November 2014, when Cleveland police answered a call that fired and within seconds shot him. When her 14-year-old sister ran to the scene, she was pushed to the ground and handcuffed. Officers were not charged.
It is this story that makes Christian Gibbs, a black father of three daughters, thank the girl from Rochester who has not been hurt more seriously, and who even cares.
“Thank God she wasn’t killed. … And the fact that we have to say it’s already an accusation of the kind of treatment we expect to be distributed, even to young children, ”said Gibbs, 46, of Bowie, Maryland.
Holly M. Frye, of South Ogden, Utah, said she has almost daily conversations with her three children about how to act around police officers, the same kind of conversations her parents had with her.
“This kind of aggression towards the black race always exists, it is now being registered,” he said. “It’s an issue that never comes off the table in our kitchen. We always talk about it constantly.”
Although data on the interactions of very young children with the police are scarce, young black people are almost five times more likely to be imprisoned compared to white young people, according to an analysis by the nonprofit organization The Sentencing Project.
The incarceration rate for white youth is 83 per 100,000; for young blacks, the number goes to 383, according to The Sentencing Project. While this is due in part to differences in crime, studies have found that black teens are more likely to be arrested and more likely to face serious consequences compared to their white peers, according to the ‘report.
And it’s not just the police and the criminal justice system. Black students face higher rates of suspension and expulsion from school, said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advance Project, which fights structural racism.
It’s about “the way adults question our black children, with this underlying assumption that they can’t be believed, that they can’t be trusted and that they’re always up to some problem,” he said. to say.
This causes trauma and mistrust on the part of young blacks towards the authorities around them, he said.
“There is no‘ friendly officer ’for black children,” he said.
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Hajela reported from Essex County, New Jersey, according to Whitehurst from Salt Lake City. Associated Press writer Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York, contributed to this report.
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Hajela is a member of The Associated Press ’race and ethnicity reporting team.