Video Shows Cincinnati Officer Confronting 11-Year-Old After Using Taser on Her

Newly released video from the body camera of an off-duty Cincinnati police officer shows the moments after he stunned an 11-year-old girl in the back with a Taser, an episode an internal review said violated several of the Police Department’s rules.

The video shows the officer, Kevin Brown, apprehending the girl at a Kroger supermarket where he was working a security detail on Aug. 6 and taking her into an office. He asks the girl, Donesha Gowdy, about items in her backpack that he said were stolen.

“This is why there aren’t any grocery stores in the black community,” he says. Both Donesha and Officer Brown are black.

The comment violated departmental rules against racial prejudice, according to the internal review, which was also released this week. Brown violated three other rules by using the stun gun in the first place, not warning Donesha that he was going to do so, and not turning on his body camera until after the fact, the review found.

The investigators “determined Officer Brown’s deployment of a Taser was not reasonably necessary to apprehend Ms. Gowdy,” the review said.

Brown’s police powers have been suspended pending a departmental hearing, said Sgt. Dan Hils, the president of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, which is representing him. After the hearing, the police chief will decide what, if any, disciplinary action should be taken.

Efforts to reach Brown were unsuccessful Thursday, and Hils said the officer would not comment publicly. The Gowdy family could not be reached Thursday.

The confrontation last month caused an immediate uproar, with some calling for Brown’s firing, and the city is reviewing its policy on when officers use the weapons. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported last week that Brown had previously been reprimanded for using a homophobic slur while speaking about a victim in a domestic violence case, a comment that was captured by his body camera.

“Tasing an 11-year-old who posed no danger to the police is wrong,” Mayor John Cranley of Cincinnati said in an emailed statement. “I’m sorry for the harm to her and her family.”

Donesha’s mother had previously told NBC News, “I’m not saying what she did was cool; I’m not saying that. But what he did was totally wrong.”

The Cincinnati Police Department is re-examining how officers use stun guns, according to Tiffaney Hardy, a spokeswoman. She said the police chief, Eliot Isaac, had said that the use of force appeared excessive and required deeper examination.

While Donesha was cited by the police, Cranley asked prosecutors to drop the charges, according to his statement, and the case was dismissed.

Hils said that the uproar around the case was misguided and that “there seems to be a lack of shock that a juvenile suspect of this age has no respect for people’s property rights.”

He added that in the exchange caught on body camera video, Brown was not “condemning her or anything about her race.”

Hils said, “Officer Brown is African-American, and he was talking to this African-American juvenile suspect, and expressing feelings of his about why it is that retail struggles sometimes in some communities.”

Brown told investigators that, as he was working off-duty security, he observed Donesha try to leave the store with items she had not paid for in her hands, according to the review. He told investigators that he asked her to stop and show him a receipt. When she did not, he tried to “reach out to grasp Ms. Gowdy,” the review said.

Donesha started running and Brown stunned her from about 10 feet away, according to Brown’s account of the night in the review.

The body camera footage, which starts after the stun gun is used, shows Brown taking Donesha into an office in the grocery store from the parking lot outside.

He empties a backpack, questioning Donesha on the items he said she and her sisters had taken.

“The last thing I want to do is Tase you like that,” Brown tells Donesha. “When I say stop, you stop. You know you’re caught, just stop. That hurt my heart to do that to you. Then I got to listen to all these idiots out there in the parking lot, about how I was wrong for Tasing you. You broke the law and you fled as I tried to apprehend you.”

The body camera footage also shows emergency medical workers trying to remove the stun gun’s barbs from Donesha’s back, as she cries and gasps.

Brown can be heard telling Donesha to calm down. “Just relax so they can take them out of you, OK?” he says.