Police Body Camera Footage Shows Officers Pepper-Spraying 9-Year-Old Girl

A couple of body camera footages released by the Rochester Police Department in New York showed deputies handcuffing an emotionally distraught 9-year-old girl and spraying her with a chemical "irritant," which was later confirmed to be pepper spray.

The release of the video footage reportedly came after Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren voiced her anguish over the police’s way of tackling the girl. "I have a 10-year-old child, so she’s a child, she’s a baby. This video, as a mother, is not anything you want to see," ABC News quoted Warren, as saying.

In a video clip, the girl is heard screaming for her father and rolling on the ground as deputies try to tackle her. The video shows deputies forcing her into a patrol vehicle and a lady officer barks commands to her, which she seems to disobey, crying hysterically. The child was then pepper-sprayed by the officers.

The incident took place after someone alerted the deputies about a "family trouble" on Friday afternoon. A total of nine officers and RPD supervisors had responded to the call, ABC News reported.

The department released a statement Saturday saying it was “required” to spray an “irritant” in the girl’s face, The Democrat and Chronicle reported. That statement also mentioned that the child was handcuffed and forced into the vehicle for her own safety and "at the request of the custodial parent on the scene," the outlet reported.

Rochester Police Department deputy chief Andre Anderson, in a news conference on Sunday, described the girl as suicidal. "She indicated she wanted to kill herself and she wanted to kill her mom,” Anderson said at the news conference.

Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan confirmed that the "irritant" had been pepper spray. Herriott-Sullivan didn’t defend the action of RPD officers.

"I’m not going to stand here and tell you that for a 9-year-old to have to be pepper-sprayed is OK. It’s not," Herriott-Sullivan said at the Sunday news conference. "I don’t see that as who we are as a department, and we’re going to do the work we have to do to ensure that these kinds of things don’t happen."

Police said the girl was later taken to Rochester General Hospital, where “she received the services and care that she needed," before being released to her family.