Rochester mayor proposes police reform after 9-year-old girl is handcuffed and peppered

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“At its heart, we must place the sacredness of human life at the core of RPDs [Rochester Police Department] police philosophy, ”Mayor Lovely Warren said during a virtual press conference.

Warren did not specifically mention the Jan. 29 incident involving the 9-year-old girl, but said it should be made clear that officers should “not shackle youth 12 and under unless they pose an immediate danger to themselves or others” .

“The current design doesn’t specify it’s imminent, but my recommendation would be to change that,” said Warren.

Two camera videos of the body released by Rochester police show officers restraining the child, handcuffing her and trying to get her into the back of a police car while she repeatedly cried and called out to her father.

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After the girl did not follow her orders to put her feet in the car, the officers see her spraying pepper spray. According to Rochester police, the girl was taken to a local hospital, where she was later released.

The agents involved have been suspended pending the results of an internal police investigation, the municipality announced on Monday.

Changing the culture of the police station

On Thursday. Warren divided the recommendations into 10 categories: accountability, community engagement and programming, data, technology and transparency, promotion of a community-based culture, officer welfare, police policies, strategies and practices, recruitment, police resizing, response on mental health calls and training.

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One of Warren’s main recommendations is that the federal court update the city’s assent decision, which limits minority representation in the police force to 25%. The decree of consent was enacted in the late 1970s, when the city’s color community made up only a quarter of the population, Warren said.

“As we said earlier, people of color represent more than 50% of the population of the city of Rochester, so our consent decision should reflect that,” said Warren, adding that 87% of the city’s officers are white, while only 47% of the population is white.

The mayor said she also supports the replacement of police by social workers to respond to calls for mental health crises, a suggestion made after Daniel Prude’s death last March. In that incident, Rochester police pinned Prude to the floor and placed a hood over his head when he experienced an episode of mental health. Prude stopped breathing and died a week later.
Warren eventually fired the Rochester Police Chief over Prude’s death and the subsequent delay by police and city officials to release camera footage of the body.

Warren also made additional recommendations for police reform, such as petitioning the state to allow Rochester to immediately terminate RPD personnel for malpractice, ban discriminatory enforcement patterns such as racial profiling, increase the size of the department over the next 5-10 years. shrink and allocate resources to other programs and create a civil public safety interview panel to assess candidates for the RPD.

Warren stressed that this was a preliminary draft of the recommendations, which will now be looked at by members of the city council and other community leaders for feedback. The council will vote on the measures at the end of March.

Laura Ly, Eric Levenson and CNN’s Travis Caldwell contributed to this report.

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