Seven-year-old cuffed by police in US

Baltimore police arrested a seven-year-old boy, handcuffed him, then hauled him off to take his mug shot and fingerprints.

The youngster allegedly rode an off-road motorcycle on a pavement.

“They scared me,” Gerard Dinkins told The Baltimore Examiner breaking down in tears.

The officers took action because they have received several complaints about dirt bikes, which are illegal within city limits, said police spokesman Matt Jablow.

Gerard, who turned seven last month, was sitting on the bike with the engine off on a pavement in east Baltimore when an officer grabbed him by the collar and pulled him off, according to his mother Kikisa Dinkins, who witnessed the arrest.

“I told them to let go of my baby,” Dinkins recalled. “Since when do you pull a seven-year-old child by his neck and drag him?”

Dinkins said she called for a police supervisor to intervene, but the confrontation continued to escalate after the supervisor arrived on the scene. “They started yelling at him: ’Do you know what you did wrong, son?”’ Dinkins said. “He was so scared he ran upstairs.”

Police confiscated the dirt bike and placed her son under arrest. At the station, he was handcuffed to a bench and interrogated before being allowed to go home with his parents.

Jablow said an officer saw Gerard riding his dirt bike on the pavement.

Mayor Sheila Dixon, who has scolded the department recently for making an excessive number of arrests that do not result in charges, said she intended to look into the facts behind Gerard’s arrest.