NY police suspended for pepper-spraying young girl
A Black Lives Matter rally marched to a police station in Rochester, New York on Monday in protest over the pepper-spraying of a 9-year-old girl.
The same day, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren ordered the immediate suspension of the police officers involved.
In a message posted on Twitter, Warren said the suspensions would continue "at a minimum" until police complete an internal investigation of the incident,
Neither the mayor nor the police department have clarified how many officers would be suspended.
Police have said the officers involved were responding to a family disturbance call on Friday.
In police body-cam footage released after the incident, unnamed officers are seen wrestling a 9-year-old girl, who appears to be Black, to the ground in the snow.
The officers then handcuff her and struggle to put her in the back of the police car, as the girl screams for her father, before pepper-spraying her in the eyes.
Rochester Deputy Police Chief Andre Anderson told reporters that the girl had quote "indicated she wanted to kill herself and she wanted to kill her mom."
A representative for the child's family could not be immediately identified.
The investigation comes months after Rochester was rocked by protests over the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who was suffocated last March when police pulled a hood over his head as he was suffering a mental health crisis.
Prude's death prompted Mayor Warren to fire the city's police chief at the time, and call for a federal review of the case.
