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A Rochester, New York, police officer was put on administrative duty after using pepper spray on a suspected shoplifting woman who tried to escape with her three-year-old in her arms, said Friday authorities.
Video of the February 22 incident has been made public at a time when the Rochester Police Department is under scrutiny over interactions with black residents, including the death last spring of Daniel Prude .
Prude, a 44-year-old African American, died after officers put him in a hood and held him naked on an icy street. Authorities said last month that the officers involved would not be charged.
Body camera video from the last encounter showed the woman, who is black, fleeing from a white officer who stopped her on the street and told her she had been accused of robbing a convenience store.
The officer chased the woman down the sidewalk, then struggled to restrain her while trying not to injure the screaming toddler. Another policeman arrived and took the child several meters away. A police statement said the woman was sprayed with pepper during her arrest.
“The child was not pepper sprayed or injured during the arrest,” the statement said.
The woman, whose name has not been released, has been charged with trespassing.
Police chief Cynthia Herriot-Sullivan told reporters on Friday the officer appeared to be following protocol, but “some things for me are not as straightforward as whether or not a policy has been followed.”
“Just because there are things we can do doesn’t mean we should be doing it,” she said. “Can we get to the same place using a different strategy?”
The city’s Police Accountability Board, an entity created by a 2019 voters’ referendum to examine allegations of police misconduct, said it saw ‘troubling parallels’ with another call emergency in which officers pepper sprayed a distraught nine-year-old girl and handcuffed them. and placed in the back of a police car during a family dispute.
“Both incidents involved black mothers,” said PAB President Shani Wilson. “Both involved black children. Both involved black people clearly in crisis. Both involved officers using pepper spray on or around a black child.
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