A woman accused of shoplifting was sprayed with a chemical irritant and knocked to the ground in front of her daughter, the latest altercation between the police and Black residents.
A woman accused of shoplifting was sprayed with a chemical irritant and knocked to the ground in front of her daughter, the latest altercation between the police and Black residents.
A Rochester, New York, police officer tackled and used pepper spray on a woman who had been accused of shoplifting and was with her young daughter last month, according to police body-camera videos of the episode that were released on Friday.
It was the latest in a series of violent altercations between officers and Black residents that have heightened racial tensions in the city.
The videos of the woman’s arrest threatened to further tarnish the reputation of the police department that is already under fire for handcuffing and using a chemical irritant on a 9-year-old girl in January and for the death last year of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died after officers put a hood over his head and pressed his head to the pavement.
“It feels like our officers are out of control,” Mary Lupien, a City Council member, said in an interview.
A bystander’s video of the woman’s arrest, on February 22, first appeared on Facebook the day it happened. But on Friday, the police released the officer’s body-camera footage and a video from a nearby security camera in response to demands from the city’s Police Accountability Board, which reviews misconduct.
Employees at a Rite Aid drugstore had called the police at about 4:30 PM that day after the woman refused to leave the store and knocked items to the floor, officials said. The body-camera video shows officers stopping the woman, who is holding her toddler, outside the store.
“Did you steal from that store?” one officer says to the woman. “Oh come on, they said you stole. What’d you take? Tell me the truth!”
The woman can be seen putting the tiny girl down and opening her purse to show the contents to the officer, the video shows. The officer demands that she wait while he speaks to store employees, but she runs across the street, gripping her child’s hand… The New York Times
