Police Traumatize a Child

by Pa Rock
Outraged Grandparent

I am blessed to be the grandfather of six happy and healthy grandchildren.  Two of those six are nine-year-old girls.

This past Friday a family in Rochester, New York, was experiencing some emotional distress.  A child in the family, a nine-year-old girl, had made remarks about killing herself and possibly killing her mother.  The child was apparently outside of the home yelling when someone telephoned emergency services.  Police responded to what was clearly a mental health issue.

Last summer police in Rochester had responded to another mental health crises, and in that response the person suffering with the mental issues, a black man, was forced to the ground and had a hood placed over his head - and died of suffocation during the encounter.  The community, and especially black members of the community, regarded the response as more severe than what would have been imposed had the person suffering the issues been white.  The Mayor of Rochester, a person by the name of Lovely Warren, responded to the community's outrage by firing the Chief of Police.  

And now, less than a year later, the police department of Rochester is embroiled in another crisis of public confidence that centers on how the department responded to a person exhibiting mental health issues.

When police arrived at the family home last Friday they found the child, a nine-year-old-girl, outside of the house screaming.  Police approached the little girl and tried to restrain her, but she resisted and was yelling for her father.  The police then handcuffed the girl and placed her in the back of the patrol car where she kept screaming.  They were having difficulty getting her feet into the vehicle when one patrolman, a woman, threatened to pepper spray her "in the eyes."  At one point a policeman yelled at the little girl that she was "acting like a child," to which she yelled back, "I am a child!"

As the melee continued one of the three responding policemen did pepper spray the child.  She was then transferred to a local hospital and later released to her parents.  

The three policemen have been "temporarily relieved of their duties."  The acting Chief of Police, a woman with a ten-year-old daughter of her own, is enraged, and Mayor Lovely is as close as she can get to becoming ballistic without actually leaving the ground.  The major part of the community seems to recognize the issue as an incompetent and dangerous response by a police department that lacks the necessary training and temperament to handle a mental health crisis as the first responder.   

The child has been traumatized by the awful experience, and some of the effects are likely to last throughout her lifetime.    And the mother, of course, is suing the city - as she damned well should.

I am a former mental health worker who has gone out on many calls to domestic situations with law enforcement personnel.  I was lucky in that the officers I worked with always let me take the lead in dealing with children.  But not every police agency has the luxury of having a social worker available to respond to family crises.  

Here are the real issues:  money and training.  Law enforcement officers are generally among the lowest paid public servants in a community.  Consequently, they seldom attract the better-qualified job candidates.  Those people are siphoned off into higher-paying jobs in American business and industry.  It is often the high school bullies who barely managed to graduate that drift into the community colleges and work for a certificate in policing skills and then wind up as street cops.  They learn a few things from their police course work in college, and they retain a few things from their days of terrorizing other kids in high school.

If communities truly valued their police they would pump more money into those agencies up front and put a focus on attracting a better class of novice policemen.  And if they start with bright, conscientious people who truly have a desire to serve the public from a positive standpoint, then those same people are far more likely to be open to training in effective community policing than are the "us against them" Neanderthals who currently populate most police agencies.

You literally get what you pay for.

The same concept applies to teachers.

I'm not for de-funding the police because law enforcement forms a necessary part of our society.  I am for adequately funding the police so that they can attract higher caliber employees.

And know this world, if any over-zealous and self-righteous cop ever handcuffs one of my beautiful grandchildren, girl or boy, and douses that child with a chemical agent, a lawsuit will be the least of their worries!