It started out as just a fun little moment. I’m a patrol officer in Clearwater, and it was my day off. My daughter, Naia, just started crawling with serious purpose, and her favorite thing right now is this red plastic toy car my sister gave her. It’s one of those foot-powered ones, no motor, just baby giggles and wobbly steering.
I set it up on our quiet cul-de-sac, thinking it’d be cute to “pull her over” like a mini traffic stop. I clipped my badge to my shirt, grabbed my radio, and walked up beside her all serious-like.
“Excuse me, ma’am, do you know how fast you were going?”
She just blinked at me, drooling and trying to chew the steering wheel. I fake-wrote her a ticket with a crayon on a napkin. My wife, Sasha, was filming and cracking up.
Then we heard a car door slam.
A woman across the street was walking toward us, fast.
“You can’t just let a baby roll around in the road like that,” she snapped. “That’s not funny. What kind of cop are you?”
I tried to explain it was staged, just for laughs, totally supervised. But she stormed off, pulling out her phone.
