Viral video of a police officer roughly driving an 8-year-old black child into his vehicle for a stolen packet of chips in upstate New York has sparked a spate of condemnations on social media and sparked an internal lawsuit with police. “As a mom, it was a heartbreaking video to watch,” New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democratic governor, said Wednesday from the city of Syracuse, where the incident occurred and where she was attending a meeting on Covid.
The video, which has been seen more than 5 million times on one of the Twitter accounts that shared it on Monday, shows a white police officer holding the crying child’s arms in the presence of at least two other officers. The cop is also holding a pack of blue chips. According to media reports, the child is eight years old and the incident happened over the weekend.
Incident “under investigation”
What are you doing? protests the man recording the video. Guess what! replies the policeman, while one of his colleagues claims the child is stealing. “He steals a pack of chips and you treat him like a criminal (…) if he stole chips I will reimburse you,” says the witness again. In an official statement Tuesday, Syracuse police assured that “the minor suspected of theft was not handcuffed” but “put on the back of a patrol unit and taken straight home.” “Officials have met with the child’s father and no charges have been filed,” added police, who said the incident was “being investigated.”
The video sparked a spate of condemnations on social media and revived recurrent allegations of racism against US police. “Rather than speak to him or handle the incident differently, the police chose to make matters worse and arrest an obviously frightened boy,” Ben Crump, a lawyer specializing in family defense, told victims on Twitter from police violence.
For the New York governor, this video is less surprising for African Americans because “they have been used to being treated differently by the police and others all their lives.” “That’s why we need to do more,” she added.