To Mayor Lovely Warren, to the Rochester City Council, to the Rochester Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan, and to other local leaders,
We, as members of the Spiritus Christi Church’s Anti-Racism Coalition (SPARC); the Rochester First Universalist Initiative for Racial Equity (F.I.R.E.); and the members of Rochester’s First Unitarian Church; and our many partners, ask for immediate attention to the horrific treatment of a 9-year-old girl in Rochester recently. To highlight our concerns:
• The pepper-spraying of a 9-year-old girl is reprehensible. We support legislation proposed by New York State Senator Samra Brouk and State Assemblyman Demond Meeks outlawing the use of chemicals on children.
• The handcuffing of a 9-year-old girl is wrong. We support legislation eliminating police use of restraints and excessive force upon children.
• The officers who participated must be suspended or fired, each according to his conduct, and the officers who stood by and did not intervene must be disciplined. Officers need to know that not interfering is as wrong as participating in the abuse.
• Yet none of the above will further the cause until a better policing system is re-created. Our current system, based on an 1819 “slave-catching” blueprint and based upon inhumane ideas about people of color, is broken.
Questions:
• Why were there nine police officers involved and without a single one with mental crisis training?
• Why do police turn to restraint and force tactics so quickly, and with so little regard to the vulnerabilities of the victims?
• Why are we not using the Person In Crisis Mental Health Team?
• Would the officers have treated this girl the same way if she were white?
Elaboration:
The system is broken
The Rochester’s Pastor Roundtable, with Spiritus Christi Pastor Rev. Myra Brown leading the Criminal Justice Committee, has been for months advocating for a process to fund and support the creation of a new policing blueprint, amid calls to begin with reforms that have been undertaken ahead of that crucial work. We believe that the recent event on Harris Street more than makes the point that it is time we as a local community admit that the systemic violence in policing against citizens of color is a patterned crime directly permitted and encouraged under the current, outmoded design of policing. We are outraged and call on immediate action to change course to fix this policing system.

The harm continues
In our community we have had adults like Benny Warr, Christopher Pate, and Daniel Prude and others who were abusively patrolled or lost their lives under the weight of the patterned crime of systemic violence in RPD policing, or mass incarcerated for not “getting down.” In a span of less than three months, we now have had two children between the ages of 9 and 10 who have also become recipients of this systemic violence as well. This is unacceptable and intolerable.
In each case, when these children were handcuffed, and in the latest case chemically sprayed, a rationale is articulated that is indefensible and inexcusable that is about control and attempts to dominate their personhood through the use of inappropriate restraint and harm.
We have solutions; why not use them?
The Police Accountability Board, in its open letter, quotes Mayor Warren as saying that the Harris Street incident “was not an incident where the Person in Crisis (PIC) or Forensic Intervention Team (FIT) would have been called because of the type of the initial 911 call.” While it may not have been a call dispatched at the onset, where in the RPD policies, practices, and procedures are they prevented from dispatching mental health professionals, once they arrived and assessed the situation to need skills beyond what they possessed to handle this child?
We need to confront racism and become antiracist
In addressing racism Dr. Joy James, a professor, author, and scholar says, that “we must not stay silent in speaking honestly about the depth and the breadth of violence arrayed against black people who are seen as expendable....” The people of color here have awaited a 400- year call for racial justice.
Those of us who are white cannot continue to idealize our civil rights icons while we turn a deaf ear on what they taught us. Martin Luther King Jr. asks again and again in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” what possible reasons there are to “wait” for justice. Claudette Colvin, at only 15 years old, was arrested and put into handcuffs when she refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated Montgomery bus in 1955 (several months before Rosa Parks did this). Colvin later said, “
did.” *
For too long, we have stood by and accepted the “adultification” of children of color, seeing children of color as less worthy of nurturing and somehow more able to endure trauma and harm.*
When the system says harm is okay, then it is the system that needs to change
Locust Club President Mike Mazzeo told us that there were no rules broken after body camera footage of a child being handcuffed and pepper sprayed was released on Sunday.
I knew then and I now know that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy
way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.' And I

If the police union president tells you about the permissions allowed in this 1819 slave patrol blueprint, we need to believe him and respond. We need to sanction the work locally to change the blueprint of policing, so that the next time this happens, it is a violation of conduct, and it DOES break the rules for administering public safety. Reform will not change the permissions etched into the blueprint.
The question is: How many more children of color, naked unarmed men of color in crisis, or disabled men and women of color have to pay the price for our unwillingness in this community to change an 1819 blueprint and challenge the power structures that uphold it?
We need your help
So, we call on our leaders to fund and support a new policing blueprint design process. Community members need to be at the table to redesign and decide on the elements of shared control and definition for public safety. As a community, we need to be given a chance to re-envision how to define public safety through a racial justice lens – to rewrite how it happens, who performs it, what we call those practitioners and what entities support it and how. What we know is that a wholesome blueprint on how we create public safety and thriving communities will serve everyone -- the public safety practitioners and the community at large.
We urge your public support in beginning the process of calling for state funding to begin a new policing blueprint design, which allows the community to regain control of a system of domination and violence that has run amuck for centuries in communities of color. Now it is coming for nine- and ten-year-old children in crisis. Taxpayers of color, like white taxpayers, deserve and are entitled to equal protections under the law, not unequal mistreatment under the law.
Supporting the process of a new policing blueprint design will benefit us all -- the officers, and the community they are called to serve.
Sincerely,
Sources:
* “Claudette Colvin.” Americanswhotellthetruth.org
* Phillip Atiba Goff et al., “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” 106 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 526 (2014).
* Rebecca Epstein et al, “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood.” (2017).