Rochester Police, in the north of the State New York, was criticized again after the publication of photos from the episodic arrest of an African-American woman accompanied by her daughter, after two other incidents that caused controversy in recent months.
The photos, posted online on Friday, February 22, show a police officer approaching a woman and explaining that the owner of a nearby store accuses her of stealing items a few minutes earlier.
The woman assures that she did not steal anything and spontaneously shows the contents of her bag. But the policeman refuses to let her go. She then starts running and police are chasing her before dropping it on the ground.
The woman manages to get up and then a police officer throws pepper spray at her, before she collapses. Away from her mom, her three-year-old daughter screams for several minutes and stops when the police bring her back together.
The Rochester Police Review Committee, which is made up only of members of civil society, said it was “disturbed” by the photos it had uploaded to the internet, Sunny Wilson, the committee chair, told a news conference on Friday.
There are currently “worrying parallels” between this incident and another police raid in late January, during which a nine-year-old boy was handcuffed and sprayed with pepper spray.
“These worrying incidents show that the Rochester police need to radically change their mindset,” the commission said, according to Sunny Wilson.
In September, images of the arrest, again in Rochester, of Daniel Proud, an African-American man who at the time had a psychotic episode, had already caused a scandal.
The 41-year-old man lost consciousness before dying, a week later, suffocating from a hood that was passed over his head by police.
The medical examiner described Proud’s death as manslaughter, which was caused by “suffocation due to physical restraint”. But jurors decided in late February not to charge any of the police officers involved in the arrest..
The case reflected the cases of George Floyd or Briona Taylor, also African Americans, who lost their lives during the violent arrests. The deaths have sparked hundreds of protests in the United States since May.
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