The videos show passersby watching as officers repeatedly told the girl, who was handcuffed, “you are going to get sprayed”, and ordered her to put her feet inside the patrol vehicle.
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Police say the girl was charged as a juvenile with assault and disorderly conduct. The teen begins to scream and cry, and can be heard saying: “I can’t breathe”. “The child was knocked unconscious”.
“Policing, sometimes the actions we take aren’t pretty and sometimes they can look pretty ugly”, Brito said.
At a news conference Thursday, Hagerstown Police Chief Victor Brito insisted his officers initially tried to de-escalate the situation, and only used pepper spray as a last resort to get the girl inside a cruiser and off to the police station as a potentially risky crowd began gathering.
One of the videos shows the girl walking away from police and trying to ride away on her bike before she was pulled back by an officer.
The girl’s dad took her to a local hospital about three hours after the incident to get the pepper spray washed out of her eyes. Hysterical, the teen pleads for the officers to let her go, which they refused to do.
Police posted the video to Facebook with this statement: “Our officers act and react in the interest of public safety in the midst of many hard situations on a regular basis”.
He also suggested that it might be best if the teen and her parents sat down with the police “in a mediation session to resolve their dispute”.
“The cops knew she might not be OK, but they didn’t treat her that way”, Ficker said. He declined to identify them.
A bystander’s cell phone footage shows the 15-year-old girl from Hagerstown, Maryland being loaded into a police vehicle Sunday.
According to the police, the officers who stopped the girl were trying to restrain her when she would not cooperate after a traffic accident. She repeatedly refuses, swears and struggles to get free.
Finally, two officers pick her up by the shoulders and legs. According to Brito, the teen was warned “multiple times” to stop kicking officers before they pepper-sprayed her.
After warnings, an officer administered the spray through the rear window, that had been rolled down approximately 3 inches.
“The only treatment she got (from police) was slamming, abuse and Mace”, said the girl’s family attorney, Robin Ficker.
The teen said she “stood her ground” when the officers told her she was being detained and that she was “a little dizzy” and everything was “blurry” after she says she was knocked out from colliding with a auto.
Ficker, retained by the mother, posted a bystander’s cellphone video on Facebook Tuesday. “That’s a little girl and they pepper sprayed her”.
“At no time did they take her to the ground”, Brito said during a news conference at Hagerstown City Hall.
“Well if someone may have brain damage, why are you slamming her against a wall?”
“You need to calm down, OK?” the officer tells her. “Take a seat”.
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Ficker said she wasn’t admitted to the hospital but suffered sprained muscles and soreness everywhere, including her wrists from being handcuffed.
