Great grandson of first Black highway patrolman victim of racial profiling

Chances are the parents of pre-teenager Uriah Sharp were scared for a moment when they heard someone had called the cops on the youngster as he delivered newspapers. It was just a few years ago that 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by police in a nearby Ohio city when someone called the police on him while he played with a toy gun at a local park. And to make matters even more “newsworthy, Uriah is the son of the states first African American highway patrolman. Brandie Sharp, Uriah’s mom, was following her ambitious boy in her car as he went door-to-door delivering newspapers. She told Cincinnati.com that she noticed Uriah had hit a few wrong houses, so she had him correct her mistakes, and it was then, she says, that someone called the Arlington police. The officers approached her car and asked if they were soliciting. She explained what her 11-year-old son was doing and the officers left. But sharp says the incident made her angry. “I have high respect for police,” she said, recalling her grandfather, Louis Sharp, the first official Black member of the Ohio State Patrol. Her anger was directed at the person who “profiled” her son. “You called the police on my 11-year-old son,” she said in a Facebook post. “I’m insulted.” Sharp, known as Bmai Love on Facebook, turned to social media to share her experience with friends never expecting the post to go viral. The police officer pulled up and asked questions “as if we were intruding in their area,” she wrote in her public Facebook post of July 6. “Totally disgusted.” Sharp continued on Facebook: “*My apologies Upper Arlington for bringing my <11> year old African American son into your neighborhood to deliver the paper and make a few dollars on the side… NO HARM INTENDED. I will make sure my boss changes his route.”