Police have apologised after an error led to at least one officer drawing their weapon on a car with two children inside.
Demetria Heard, a nurse from Little Rock, Arkansas, was driving her husband, young son and nephew to a basketball tournament when the family were pulled over on Friday in Frisco, Texas.
Dramatic bodycam footage of the incident shows officers approaching the black Dodge Charger with guns drawn, warning the vehicle’s occupants they faced being shot if they did not comply.
One of the officers can be heard saying: ‘Open up your car door and step out of the car. Unlock your car, do it now. Unlock your car [and] slowly exit the vehicle.’
Both Ms Heard and her son were taken out of the vehicle and handcuffed, with police telling them not to move while the vehicle was searched for weapons.
The officers said: ‘Occupants in the car, leave your hands outside the car. We know there is a gun in there. If you reach in the car, you may get shot. So be careful. Do not reach in the car.’
But police then swiftly realised they’d made a mistake, with one of them soon commenting ‘this isn’t the stolen vehicle’ before lowering their weapon.
The officers turned out to have run the car’s licence plate against an Arizona database by mistake, which in turn flagged the vehicle as likely to have been stolen.
Ms Heard’s husband, a basketball coach, then broke down in tears, saying he’d feared for his son’s life and explaining his brother had recently been killed.
A female officer can be heard saying to him: ‘It looks like I made a mistake. So I ran it AZ for Arizona, instead of AR, and that’s what happened. So I made a mistake.’
Ms Heard’s husband then responds: ‘It could all have gone wrong for us, though.’
One of the other officers then responds: ‘Sorry man. I’m sorry, brother. Okay? Look man we, I’m going to be honest, man, being on the scene, knowing that children were involved, that’s why we were moving so slow.
‘We were apprehensive brother, you know what I mean? We weren’t trying to be like, all fast and stuff.’
Frisco Police Chief David Shilson also apologised for the incident in a written statement, adding that the department accepts responsibility.
A review of national police violence data released last year by NGO Mapping Police Violence revealed US police have killed almost 600 people in traffic stops since 2017.
The research showed that black people, in particular black men, were massively overrepresented among the victims of such encounters.
Its release followed not long after the death of Patrick Lyoya, a 26-year-old black man who was shot in the head as he ran from officers after a traffic stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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