An upstate New York police investigator is on paid suspension after handcuffing a Black EMT inside a hospital emergency room last week. He had been on desk duty.
The encounter began when Monroe Ambulance EMT Lekia Smith hit a Rochester Police investigator’s car with her vehicle’s door while unloading a patient in the ambulance bay of Strong Memorial Hospital.
The investigator, who is white, asked for her ID, but Smith wanted to transport the patient inside the hospital first.
According to Smith’s attorney, Donald Thompson, the investigator brought Smith to his police car, questioned her in the backseat while still handcuffed. After the questioning he released her.
Rochester’s police union, the Locust Club, called the investigator’s suspension “perplexing.”
“The incident in question reached a mutually acceptable resolution that day when both the investigator and the EMT were able to jointly discuss the reasons for their actions, and both accepted each other’s explanations,” it said in a statement.
Shields said that was not accurate.
Save Rochester said the incident pointed to a damaged relationship between police and people of color. In 2020, police and city officials came under fire for their handling of the suffocation death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died that March a week after being held by police officers against the pavement until he stopped breathing.
This is an NV update from last week.
