Donroy Ferdinand and his friend were leaving the Shaw-Howard U Metro station Thursday night when they saw a 13-year old boy in handcuffs, surrounded by three Metro Transit Police officers.

Ferdinand, a student at Howard University, told WAMU he immediately began filming on his cell phone.

“I was upset,” Ferdinand said. “I was not happy seeing a black kid who looks like me when I was that age in handcuffs. So I was just trying to figure out what was going on.”

That’s what Metro Transit Police says it wants to do, too. Its Office of Professional Responsibility and Integrity is reviewing the incident as a citizen’s complaint, a spokeswoman wrote in an email, after Ferdinand posted a portion of his video to Twitter.

“There were no citizen complaints received outside of social media or from the respondent’s family,” the spokesperson wrote. MTPD is “not in a position to make any conclusory statements” as it reviews the case, and the officers remain on full duty status, the spokesperson said.

Metro Says Boy ‘Assaulted’ Officer

A Metro incident report says two officers stopped the boy and his friend when they saw them run onto a train after “grabbing on to each other in a manner as if they were fighting” on a station platform. The boys told the officers they were “just playing.”

According to the report, which was written by one of the officers involved, one of the boys refused to give the police officers his name or a parent’s phone number, which the officers said they needed in order to report that he had been stopped. (It’s unclear if the second boy gave any information to police.)

Then the boy stood up, and one officer stepped forward, prompting the boy to push him and tell him to back away from him, according to the report.

The officer told the boy that he’d assaulted a police officer and was under arrest. The boy struggled as the officer attempted to handcuff him, and the officer put him on the ground.

“He placed his hands in his pockets and refused to comply with my instructions to give me his arms,” the report reads.

A second officer helped handcuff and search the boy once he was on the ground.

WAMU is not publishing the boy’s name or image, as he is a minor.

Ferdinand posted a short clip of the video he took on Twitter, which begins after the boy has been placed in handcuffs. A longer version was also posted on YouTube.

Here’s what the footage shows: The boy says that he only stepped on the officer’s foot after the officer stepped on his foot. Meanwhile, Ferdinand and other passersby ask the officers what happened and why the officers needed to handcuff the boy, who is in tears.

“What present danger does this kid serve? Why is he in handcuffs?” Ferdinand asks in the footage.

A police officer who says that he didn’t witness the original incident attempts to answer their questions. He tells the boy and onlookers that the boy “committed horseplay,” which constituted disorderly conduct. The same officer identifies the possible charge as assault. “He just admitted, when he stepped on the officer’s foot, that’s an assault,” the officer explains in the video. “Once he assaulted the officer, yeah, you go in handcuffs. Once he stepped on the officer, he assaulted the officer.”

“I can appreciate that you are very concerned, I hear it, I understand, you’re confused about what’s going on. I’m confused about what’s going on,” the officer says in the footage.

‘I’m Terrified For Him,’ Bystander Says

At the end of the video, the officers take the boy out of the station to a waiting ambulance to take him to Children’s National Hospital. Officers accompanied the boy in the ambulance.

Ferdinand and others object, asking why no one else is allowed to ride along with the boy and the officers.

“I’m terrified for him. Imagine how scared he is,” Ferdinand can be heard saying in the video.

According to the incident report, the boy continued resisting at the hospital, where he kicked an officer trying to restrain him on a hospital bed.

The boy stayed in D.C.’s juvenile processing center overnight, his mother told The Washington Post. She was not sure if charges would be pressed, or if he’d be placed in a diversion program.

Metro Transit Police have come under scrutiny from the D.C. Council after a number of incidents involving officers ended in violence. In one instance last year, a man was tased and arrested after he tried to question officers who were detaining a juvenile.

Ferdinand said he shared his video and spoke to officials investigating the incident over the weekend. He told WAMU that he hopes the incident prompts Metro Transit Police to rethink how officers interact with children, citing a D.C. police policy shift on the subject.

The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department—a different agency from Metro Transit Police—announced two weeks ago that officers would no longer be allowed to handcuff children under the age of 12. The new policy leaves the decision to handcuff juveniles ages 13 to 17 up to officers, depending on “the severity of the offense and circumstances of the interaction.”

“Juveniles don’t have the same brain development as adults, and they need to be treated differently particularly when they’re getting into interactions with police,” D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham told the D.C. Council.

“All that I hope can come out of this is some justice for the little boy,” Ferdinand said.