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A family is demanding justice after an Ohio police officer searched their 5-year-old child’s pocket when his dad was pulled over during a routine traffic stop.
Brandon Wilson said he was driving his Volkswagen SUV across the street to his mother’s home when Parma Police officers pulled him over at around 9:20 p.m. on Dec. 26, WOIO reported.
He said the officers pulled him over because his plates had expired and his front tinted window was too dark.
Wilson, whose son was in the car with him, said the cops opened his driver’s side door, questioned him, and then asked him to get out of his vehicle. He complied, and his son followed.
Video recorded by the boy’s uncle shows Wilson being searched by cops with his hands up in the air with his son at his side.
One of the officers is then seen leaning over and appears to search the 5-year-old’s pockets while his hands are raised in the air.
“Dad didn’t give you nothing, right?” the cop can be heard asking the youngster.
The upset father tells his son to put his hands down and stand with his uncle after the search, but the child doesn’t move and appears unsure of what to do. An officer then leads the youngster away from the car.
“My son right here and he’s going in my son’s pockets,” Wilson told WOIO.
“I’m like, ‘Y’all shouldn’t touch him at all in the first place,’ and then y’all search my car and there’s nothing in there.”
Wilson said he complied with all the police orders during the traffic stop to help keep his son calm and knew he had done nothing wrong.
However, the concerned father said the incident appears to have shaken the child.
“He’s reenacting it with his toys. That’s not cool. They could have went about it a whole different way,” he said. “The officers didn’t have to touch him, I don’t care what y’all do to me.”
The outraged dad wants the Parma Police Department to launch an internal investigation into the traffic stop.
Wilson believes the police had no probable cause to search his car for anything illegal, and a dog was used to search for drugs after he had already told them there were none in the vehicle, according to WOIO.
The department acknowledged that the traffic stop was for “an expired license plate and tinted windows.”
“A K-9 officer assisted in the traffic stop and walked his dog around the vehicle and the K-9 alerted on the passenger side, where the five-year-old was seated,” the department said in a statement last week. “The adult driver was cited and released, and his vehicle was not towed.”
On Friday, police released a follow-up statement saying that the K-9 is trained to sniff for narcotics and that officers were required to search all the occupants when the dog became alert to something on the passenger’s side.
The department claims officers never instructed the boy to raise his hands in the air, and an officer told him he could put his hands down.
Police said the “interaction with the child was brief, professional, and focused on ensuring the child’s welfare.”
“Our decision to conduct this search was influenced by the increasing prevalence of tragic incidents where children have been harmed or killed after accidentally coming into contact with dangerous substances,” the release said.
“In Ohio and across the nation, there have been cases where children have overdosed on drugs that were negligently left within their reach. This is a risk our officers work to prevent. In this case, our review process has confirmed that the officer acted reasonably, professionally, and with the child’s safety as a primary concern.”
However, the hardworking father wants to be treated fairly and has raised his kids to respect cops rather than fear them.
“I own my house. I pay my taxes,” he said. “They just seen me and thought, ‘He looks like he’s up to no good.’”
Wilson and his family have since hired attorneys from The Elkhatib Law Office, who said they plan to “vigorously audit and investigate every aspect of this incident.”
“The search of a five-year-old child is particularly egregious,” the firm said in a statement.
“The police claim this was for the child’s ‘safety,’ yet the facts paint a different picture: a frightened child raising his hands and being unnecessarily searched while no evidence of danger or controlled substances was present. This was not about safety—it was an abuse of power that inflicted unnecessary trauma on an innocent child.”
