Police Hurt Thousands Of Teens Every Year. An Alarming Number Are Black Girls.

Police have pep­per sprayed young peo­ple, shocked them with Tasers or body-slammed them, often after con­fronting them over the most minor of offenses.

Abbie VanSickle and Weihua Li, The Marshall Project.

HAGERSTOWN, Md. — On a warm September Sunday in 2016, a small Black teenag­er in a pink T‑shirt biked through nar­row city streets and rolled into an inter­sec­tion. So did a Chevy Cruze, dri­ven by an 85-year-old man head­ing home from church.
The next thing 15-year-old Brianna Stuart knew, she was lying dazed on the pave­ment, she said in an inter­view. The dri­ver alert­ed 911 about the accident.
Her mom would be so mad at her, she thought. Her par­ents had warned her nev­er to talk to police with­out them in this major­i­ty-white com­mu­ni­ty – and told her not to bike in this part of town.
She cursed at offi­cers try­ing to ques­tion her and climbed back on her Huffy.

White offi­cers pulled the 100-pound girl off her bike by her back­pack straps, a police body cam­era video shows. As she strug­gled to get away, they shoved her against a build­ing and locked her wrists into cuffs while she sobbed and cursed and screamed. “You let that badge go to your head,” a bystander called out.
The police car­ried the increas­ing­ly hys­ter­i­cal teen to a patrol car, but she refused to put her feet inside, the video shows. The police on the scene lost patience. “I’ll spray her,” one said.
He waved the pep­per spray toward her face, and then pushed down on the can­is­ter. It hissed, twice. Stuart shrieked and cried out, “I can’t breathe!” She con­tin­ued to wail as the offi­cers milled around out­side the car.
The police depart­ment said its offi­cers han­dled the sit­u­a­tion cor­rect­ly. But bystander video – of a kid’s bike acci­dent that esca­lat­ed out of con­trol – spread on social media.
The inci­dent echoes sim­i­lar scenes across the coun­try: A 9‑year-old girl in Rochester, New York, pep­per-sprayed as she sat in hand­cuffs in the back of a patrol car, cry­ing for her dad. A teenage girl at a Texas pool par­ty, wres­tled to the ground by an offi­cer. An Iowa teen, pep­per-sprayed by police as she wait­ed for the bus after school. All were Black.
Read the full sto­ry here; https://​www​.usato​day​.com/​i​n​-​d​e​p​t​h​/​n​e​w​s​/​i​n​v​e​s​t​i​g​a​t​i​o​n​s​/​2​0​2​1​/​1​1​/​0​2​/​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​h​u​r​t​-​m​a​n​y​-​t​e​e​n​s​-​e​a​c​h​-​y​e​a​r​-​a​l​a​r​m​i​n​g​-​n​u​m​b​e​r​-​b​l​a​c​k​-​g​i​r​l​s​/​8​5​5​7​9​6​0​0​02/