Halifax police hand toddler motorcyclist a (fake) parking ticket

The ticket might not be real, but the online love is.

A photo of a young Halifax biker getting a ticket for illegally parking on the waterfront has seen thousands of likes and shares online after it was tweeted from the Halifax Regional Police's Twitter account.

The photo shows Halifax Const. Shawn Currie writing a three-year-old boy and his red, plastic motorcycle a blank ticket. The boy's hand rests on his head, exasperated.

"Remember, no motorcycle parking in the circle by the ferry terminal. This ruthless biker was caught yesterday," reads the tweet.

Currie was patrolling the area on Friday night for the postponed Canada Day fireworks, trying to keep Chebucto Landing clear of parked cars and motorcycles.

"This one young fellow comes down, he brings his little motorcycle down and he parked it just like the big motorcycles. We thought it would be funny to go over and I pretended to write a ticket for him ... it just created all kinds of atmosphere," said Currie.

"It was just perfect timing where he put his hand on his head."

The boy's father snapped the photo and sent it on to police.

As of Tuesday morning the photo had been liked more than 9,000 times on Facebook.

'All just in good humour'

Currie says he's blown away by the online reaction.

"It's something so simple. It's stuff that I do every day, just meeting people, talking to people and taking pictures every day. I don't expect things to be this big. It was cute," he said.

The constable says sometimes people are surprised to learn police have a sense of humour.

"Unfortunately we don't show the human side of the police officers," he said.

"It's when the negativity comes out or if there's a shooting or something like that, that's usually when police are in the media. That's only a small portion of our day. My job is to be out in the public and be accessible."

Currie stresses the ticket was blank.

"This was all just in good humour. The three-year-old, he doesn't understand it. For him it's just meeting a police officer. I gave him a shoulder patch too."

However, grown ups won't get off as lucky if they're caught parking by the ferry.

"People forget it's no parking," Currie said. "We write parking tickets where we have to."