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 — 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.

Black youths make up the majority of kids on the receiving end of police violence — and a striking number of them are girls, an investigation by The Marshall Project found.

There is no comprehensive national database of violent interactions between police and civilians. But when we looked at data for six large police departments that provided detailed demographic information on use-of-force incidents, we found nearly 4,000 youngsters 17 and under experienced police violence from 2015 through 2020.

Almost 800 of the children and teens — roughly a fifth of the total — were Black girls. White girls were involved in about 120 cases, representing only 3% of use-of-force incidents involving minors.

Read the full article about police violence against Black girls by Abbie VanSickle and Weihua Li at The Marshall Project.