Let’s stipulate - there can NEVER be a scenario where a police call ends with the next day’s headline being – “9 year old pepper sprayed in the back of a cruiser.” Nobody thinks that the way the situation ended in Rochester was right or necessary, I certainly don’t.
That said, when I watch the full body cam footage of the incident that was released on Sunday, I come away with very different feelings than I do when I see Officer Chauvin on George Floyd’s neck for example. Rochester was not a case of out-of-control hardo cops who demanded their authority be respected or else. Instead, what I see on the Rochester video is a cop trying his best to get control of a scene, but it’s a scene that he simply couldn’t control. The mother’s presence, the bystanders gawking, the girl not cooperating in any way… try as he might, he simply wasn’t going to bring about a good resolution once the girl started screaming for her father.
And he tried, he tried for a good twelve minutes. In that time, he wasn’t yelling, threatening, or using excessive force. Instead, he was trying to get the girl to talk to him, and he was trying to get her away from the surrounding scene. However, try as he might, his efforts not only did not diffuse the situation, they inflamed the girl and made things worse. Then, when backup came, it didn’t come with a bigger vehicle that would have been easier to put her in. And because the officers were now locked in on getting her in the car and getting her out of there (a reasonable goal to be sure) one of them made a really stupid decision. Thus, the next day’s disturbing headline.
When I watched the horrific Officer Chauvin on George Floyd’s neck video, my immediate thought was- this is everything we don’t want cops to be. In fact, Chauvin is everything we don’t want HUMAN BEINGS to be. That Rochester cop was not Officer Chauvin, not in any way. He came upon a situation that he’d never dealt with before, and when his best efforts failed, he had no fallback plan. But he is not a BAD cop, not on that video. I understand that people want “justice”, but what is “justice” in this case? A settlement? Certainly, and I expect that Rochester will be cutting a check soon. But what of the cops? Do they need to be fired? If that video is an indication of what kind of officers they are, then I say no. Better training? Yes. Clearer protocols? Absolutely. Fired? Time will tell…