CLARENCE PAGE: A 9-year-old girl in Rochester, ill-trained police, need in all cities for more community help

Rochester, again?

The video-recorded pepper-spraying of a screaming, handcuffed 9-year-old Black girl by police last week has gone viral, and it’s painful to watch.

It is even more painful when we recall another video released last fall of a mentally ill Black man dying naked in the street after Rochester, New York, police put a hood over his head.

Our outrage following both of these scandalous tragedies is further inflamed by frustration. Both incidents should remind us that in the tension between the need for law enforcement and police accountability, there are no easy solutions. But there are solutions.

After video of the death of Daniel Prude, who was visiting from Chicago, stirred protests and a national uproar, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren fired the police chief. The city also launched a new Person in Crisis team of counselors and social workers to answer emergency calls for people “experiencing emotional or behavioral turmoil.”

The program is burdened by potential miscommunication, though. It requires a caller to call 911 to request mental health services for themselves or call 211, the area’s crisis hotline number, to seek help for someone else.

Unfortunately, as a city spokesman told reporters, the call Friday for the little girl came in as a “domestic” or “family trouble” crime report, not a mental health call, which would have been directed to the crisis team counselors.

As a result, police were called to the scene. As depicted in widely viewed footage posted to YouTube, chaos ensued. The girl, who was not identified, is seen screaming to be let go as police restrain her in a patrol car. When an officer tells her she’s “acting like a child,” she responds, “I am a child.” Moments later, the video shows an officer pepper-spraying the girl and leaving her crying in the back seat.

Mayor Warren announced on Monday that the officers involved in the spraying would be suspended, pending an internal investigation. But, as in the case of Prude, the officers appeared to be ill-prepared for what they encountered.

That’s a major reason why, as I have written before, cases such as these call for something other than the conventional police response. A surprising number of nonemergency calls have less to do with law enforcement than with other social failures.

Much of last year’s political debate was embroiled in a call to “defund the police,” a misleading slogan that many reformers refashioned into the more helpful “rethink policing.”

Thinking anew about policing encourages innovations such as Rochester’s Person in Crisis teams, crisis-intervention services of social workers and other counselors that Chicago and a growing number of other cities offer.

But we also need civilian involvement at the neighborhood level. Cities plagued by high crime rates in recent years share similar problems with widespread distrust of police by local citizens — and vice versa.

Just hours before the incident in Rochester erupted, some mothers who have lost children to homicide announced a new national movement called Voices of Black Mothers United to raise awareness and organize grassroots efforts at the neighborhood level.

“We’re not saying ‘defund the police’ because, yes, we want more police in our community,” said executive director Sylvia Bennett-Stone in an online news conference Friday. She lost her daughter in 2004 to a stray bullet. “But we also want them to be accountable.”

That calls for constructive support by citizens whom police are sworn to serve and protect, said Robert Woodson of the Woodson Foundation, which convened the group as part of his 40 years of work with grassroots organizations. “We believe the solutions come from the same ZIP codes as the problem,” Woodson said.

I wish them the best of luck. Other mothers have organized against violence and had some success and, in some sad cases, tragedy.

Two Chicago mothers, Chantell Grant and Andrea Stoudemire, participated in daily vigils organized by Mothers Against Senseless Killings in 2015 until the two were fatally shot, senselessly and cowardly, at a troubled intersection in the city’s Englewood neighborhood.

And the city’s surge of violence — Chicago homicides in January hit 51, the highest for the wintry month in the past four years — continues. So does the need for better cooperation nationwide between police and the communities they patrol.

Clarence Page is a Chicago Tribune columnist. Contact vial email at cpage@chicagotribune.com.