[B]urlington Police are defending the use of pepper spray to disarm a 6-year-old girl who threatened a caregiver, the police and herself with a knife.
The child was hit by a vapor cloud of pepper spray and dropped the knife in a sometimes highly charged police call that lasted a little over 10 minutes from the time the first officer arrived to when they were able to secure the butcher knife.
The incident happened exactly one year ago and was revealed two weeks ago when police mistakenly posted a video of the pepper-spraying on social media, which was quickly taken down. Before the video went up, City Councilor Ali Dieng mentioned the case without detail at a council meeting discussing police use of force. Dieng said the child involved had mental health issues.
Disclosure of the 2018 pepper-spraying of the child comes at a time when Burlington police are already under scrutiny for use-of-force tactics that have prompted lawsuits and damaged trust between the public and police, according to Mayor Miro Weinberger. One case, in which a man died several days after being punched by an officer, was reviewed by the Vermont State Police and the Vermont attorney general.
A lawyer “partnering” with the child’s family said the child was traumatized by the afternoon events. He emphasized the case was more than about evaluating the police actions — it highlighted the need for more mental health services for families, as well as more police training, particularly when dealing with children in crisis. He said other police departments, including Chicago, and mental health agencies, offer such training.
“This situation, like many others, is the result of holes in our mental health system and gaps in collaboration and training for mental health and law enforcement,” said Jay Diaz of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Unless public officials can address those gaps, situations like this are bound to happen again and we hope they will address those gaps so situations like this don’t happen again.”
The officer in charge at the scene said it was the first time in 20 years he had responded to a young child in crisis with a knife and said there was no playbook to follow. Since then, he said officers have included a video of the event in their training to discuss hypotheticals and other possible responses. Police are trained in how to deal with an adult with a knife, but not a child, the officer said.
“It was weird because our usual response if it’s an adult is pretty spelled out. You try to de-escalate, keep space. And then we get there and it’s a child and this changes everything. We have to be even more kid gloves,” said Lt. Justin Couture, who was then a sergeant. “This one we had to rethink some of the playbook. Hopefully we never have to deal with it again.”
“It was complicated, I’ll tell you. I left there scratching my head. Pepper spray is pretty low-level across the board, but when you’re talking about a child, it’s like man, what else could we have done. It’s really a head scratcher,” Couture said in an interview Friday. “I remember driving home that night and thinking, ‘Holy crap, what was that?’”
According to police reports, a neighbor called police after the child went on a rampage and destroyed property in the neighborhood. The girl was pursuing her caretaker — a licensed mental health counselor, according to police — and “swinging the knife about” when police arrived at her Burlington home. Her tantrum began, police reports said, when she refused to go to the beach after coming home from school. According to the police reports, she had swung a garden rake at the caretaker before obtaining the knife. The damage in the neighborhood before police arrived included smashed flower pots and figurines, and slashed screen doors, according to police reports, officer body camera video, and photographs taken by police.
Burlington Police Cpl. Matthew White was first on the scene and standing about 10 feet away when he requested the child, who was standing in her driveway, to drop the knife. White said she started “slashing the knife in my direction and at one point I thought she was going to throw the knife at me.”
Police photos show the butcher knife was about 8 inches long and 2 inches at its widest.
White said he unholstered his stun gun when the child was holding the knife “within lunge-able distance” from him and the caretaker, but said he never aimed the electronic device at her.
After White called for backup, three officers arrived minutes later. Couture, the supervising officer, pulled out his baton in hopes of knocking the knife out of the child’s hand. He said he told White to re-holster his stun gun, in part fearing the child could fall on the knife if struck. Police also used acrylic shields so they could get close to the child with less risk of being injured by the knife. Six Burlington police officers responded in total.
According to the reports and videotape, police lost track of the child for several minutes when she ran around the back of house. They searched her home thinking she had returned inside and found her outside on a neighbor’s lawn making a “slashing movement of the knife against her forearm.” The girl went between two houses where police told her again to drop the knife. The child refused, the report said, and the video shows the child slamming the blade on what police said was a neighbor’s lighting fixture.
White said in his official report that he feared for himself, fellow officers, neighbors who had come outside to see what was going on, as well as the child.
Another officer who had responded, Officer Darren Kennedy, was in front of a house, with the child around the side, still holding the knife, when he got close enough to try to spray the child. White said he feared any “physical hands-on attempt” to take away the knife could have resulted in a struggle and injured either officers or the child.
Kennedy, according to the reports, took aim after Couture gave his approval to use the pepper spray.
The pepper spray stream “hit the corner of the house” and “the wind carried the mist” toward the girl, “which caused her to drop the knife and begin crying,” White reported. An officer helped the girl and tried to flush the pepper spray out of her eyes with a neighbor’s garden hose, then police took the child to rescue squad members who had been standing by and provided medical care, according to the police reports and a 27-minute video of the incident.
Couture wrote: “It was very windy and most of the pepper spray missed the child. A mist of pepper spray effected (sic) the child and she immediately dropped the knife and put her hands to her face while screaming.”
Video shows the child crying hysterically as officers lead her to medical personnel, whom they had called during the incident.
“It was a lot to figure out on the fly without a lot of input” about what the child’s situation was, Couture said in the interview.
Even though the child had made slashing motions on her wrists, she had apparently not cut herself, according to officer reports.
The child’s mother, who had been called by police, arrived shortly after the situation de-escalated while the girl was being treated and took her home, police said.
The videotape viewed by VTDigger obscured the child’s face to protect her identity but clearly showed her waving the knife on several occasions. She approaches, withdraws and flees from the officers as they try to coax her to drop the knife; at one point she appears to be dancing, but there are also several minutes where she stands still with the knife, it is uncertain what she will do next and the situation is clearly tense.
Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo said — and Couture insisted — the officers’ primary concern was the child’s safety. Several times on the videotape officers make slashing gestures against their forearm, indicating what they had seen the child threaten to do to herself.
“When I spoke to the officers, their concern wasn’t for their safety; their concern was really for the child,” del Pozo said in an interview Thursday. “The way she was acting was unpredictable and they were really alarmed by watching her run the knife across her arm in front of them at least twice. And they felt like if they were to just wait and she were to suddenly cut herself, they couldn’t live with that outcome.”
Del Pozo portrayed using pepper spray as the best of difficult options, considering the uncertainty of the situation and the age of the child. At one point on the videotape, an officer asks if they are authorized to even use a stun guy on a child. (Del Pozo said they are.)
There was no “golden option,” the chief said.
“Waiting had a lot of risks, the way the child was behaving with a knife on her own body. Anything more forceful would have been completely inappropriate. Grabbing the child would have been very traumatic. And if the child was cut with a knife or something like that, it would have been completely unacceptable.”
De-escalation hadn’t worked, speaking to the child hadn’t worked, even with her mental health caseworker trying to help police.
And the pepper spray worked in disarming the child, del Pozo said.
“If the measure of a police department is its ability to get people in crisis to help safely and without injuring them, then we were able to do that with her,” the chief said. “If people say you may never use force to do that, especially on a child, I want to hear their alternatives, because I’d love to know what they were.”
He added: “If someone can assure me that they can always get a child to help who’s armed with a knife and drawing it across their arm, without hurting them, without causing a confrontation with someone else on the block, another child in the backyard and they can do that without any kind of force, I would love to hear that. I would embrace that.”
Asked about his description that the child was “not injured,” del Pozo said:
“The whole point of pepper spray is not to cause injury, it’s to cause enough discomfort, at times pain, to get people to drop a knife or stop what they’re doing,” he said. “It’s not meant to injure people.”
Del Pozo and Couture, who is in charge of training, said pepper spray is not used on adults with a knife because it might not be effective.
“I don’t know. Pepper spray, it’s not fun to talk about like, hey we sprayed a kid, but in the end it worked, even an indirect hit, it worked awesome without a lasting injury,” Couture said.
“I’d love to have a magic answer,” Couture said.
Diaz said there are numerous training programs being used across the country that train police to effectively deal with children in crisis.
“What’s clear is that (police) had no certainty about what they should do in a situation like this and not sure how to respond to a child in crisis,” he said, “and that’s a major concern for the family and for all families and should be a major concern of the broader public and public officials.” In addition to more funding for mental health in general, Diaz said more training funds are needed too.
Mayor Weinberger said Friday: “This was a very challenging and unusual situation for any Police Department. I am reassured that our officers were able to resolve this incident without lasting injury to the child.”
The videotape of the incident was posted by mistake when the police tried to internally share a copy and made it public instead, del Pozo said. He said it was posted for about an hour before being removed.
VTDigger is not posting the video in the interest of protecting the identity of the child and her residence.
“What the family has always wanted to see is some meaningful reform so this doesn’t happen to other children in future. We know these things are preventable in the first place if there’s access to enough resources and that in the moment it can go much differently if you are adequately trained,” Diaz said.