Hannah Schneeberger has been identified as one of the Rochester Police officers that pepper sprayed a 9 year old black girl earlier this week. She was identified thanks to the Open Oversight database, the Reddit postings of an ex, her own social media activity, and of course the video of her pepper spraying the child in the back seat of a patrol car.
We had no idea who the female officer in the video was until the pieces came together over the past couple hours. We stumbled on the first piece on Reddit where a user had posted a story titled "My ex pepper sprayed the 9 year old in Rochester" (https://www.reddit.com/r/byebyejob/comments/laybzw/my_ex_pepper_sprayed_the_9_year_old_in_rochester/). That posting did not contain the full name of the officer, but it did include a screenshot of a conversation with her (https://preview.redd.it/v1f0njfy23f61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=ad16b15b276fb5d6c092b0b85f1a5481ce978886). In that screenshot you can see the name that the owner of the phone gave her when adding her to his contacts list. That name was "Crazy Hannah." Crazy Hannah said "Hahaha" when her ex sent a text saying "Who would have thought after years of bible thumping that I'd be helping kids and you'd be macing them!" Then she denied macing anyone.
Our next stop was the police officer database run by Open Oversight. The Open Oversight database contains the names of over 1,000 Rochester Police officers. We searched that database for all white female officers and browsed that list for anyone with the fist name Hannah. We found just one Rochester officer named Hannah on that list and that officer is Hannah Schneeberger (https://openoversight.com/officer/33397). We also ran her name through GovSalaries and learned that she made $74,693 working as a patrol officer for the city of Rochester last year (https://govsalaries.com/schneeberger-hannah-90977831). We also ran her name through our background check service and learned that one Hannah Mcrae Schneeberger currently lives in Rochester.
At that point we were still not certain that we had the right person. For all we know the Reddit posting could have been a joke. We wanted to find undeniable proof that this is the same person, so we turned to Google. After a search for "Hannah Schneeberger Rochester" failed to turn up anything useful, we did a search for "Hannah Schneeberger police" and hit the jackpot. That jackpot was a Pinterest account setup under the name Hannah Schneeberger (https://www.pinterest.de/bballchicki123/) with an image board titled "police" (https://www.pinterest.de/bballchicki123/police/) full of thin blue line propaganda and another board titled "Pew Pew" (https://www.pinterest.de/bballchicki123/pew-pew/) full of thin blue line themed guns as well as bible quotes consistent with the ex calling her a Bible thumper. Most importantly the account contains a profile image that bears a striking resemblance to the female officer in the video below (https://i.pinimg.com/280x280_RS/46/54/34/465434781ff02f91ceb3b77a22a7621b.jpg). Schneeberger is wearing a Shamrock Jack's Irish Pub t-shirt in her Pinterest image. Shamrock Jack's Irish Pub is a bar located on Culver Road in Rochester, New York (https://www.shamrockjacks.com/aboutus.html).
Based on the striking similarities between the Pinterest profile picture and the woman in the video combined with the overwhelming evidence that Hannah Schneeberger is in fact the name of a current Rochester Police officer we are confident that this is the right person. If you compare the images from Pinterest to the video below and the stills we took from it you should notice striking similarities between the two. Most notably the cheeks, nose, and forehead appear to match as well as the hair and eyes. She does look a little heavier in the cheeks in the video, so you need to keep that in mind. There are certainly far more similarities than there are differences, so much so that we would be shocked to learn that this is not the same person.
UPDATE: We received a reply from the Redditor that posted about Hannah. His reply confirmed that his Crazy Hannah is in fact Hannah Schneeberger, "I normally don't reply to people but I had to say good job. I'm always impressed when Redditors sleuth the way they do. I probably don't know anything more than what you've found. I try to keep a wide berth from her for personal reasons."
UPDATE: Sneeze Booger has deleted her Pinterest account, but the original profile image is still available on the file system.
UPDATE: RPD released her name today and released new body camera footage earlier this week. It turns out Schneeberger didn't pepper spray the little girl because after she was seen shaking her can of pepper spray the ditz dropped it, so officer Lombard had to spray her by himself. We will not change the headline over this since we consider it the same thing and think that she would have used her pepper spray if it were not for her butter fingers.
UPDATE: We isolated Schneeberger's body camera footage and posted it on YouTube as a stand alone video. The RPD released about 86 minutes of footage that included the body camera footage from officers that had not been seen by the public before. That included Schneeberger's body camera. You can watch that video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9AeCan522I
If you watch the body camera footage you will see that Schneeberger was about to pepper spray the girl before she dropped her can like an incompetent klutz. Then Lombard fired his pepper spray at her. This fact does not change our conclusion that Schneeberger is responsible for the pepper spraying of the girl, so we will not change the title of this article. She can't say that because she dropped her can it wasn't her fault. It might be the reason Lombard used his pepper spray, but had she not started threatening the girl with pepper spray none of the officers would have been ready to pepper spray her at all.