What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Fake Police Bodycam Videos

Another week, another "gotcha" video debunked. This time it's "Cop Pulls Over Black Judge and Lives To Regret It," a piece of pseudo-documentary street drama that's been viewed millions of times on YouTube and TikTok (and elsewhere, I'm sure). The video is part of a growing online video genre based on documenting cops' confrontations with public, either through police-worn body camera footage or citizen-filmed footage. Some of these videos are real, but many of them are not.

Here's the "Cop Pulls Over Judge" video:

The tells: bad improv in a Florida parking lot

If you have a smidge of media literacy, it's easy to spot this as fake.

• The acting is sub-community-theater level.

• The improved dialogue is laughably on the nose.

• I'm pretty sure judges don't wear judicial robes when they're running errands.

• The taillight the cop supposedly broke is intact at the end of the video

That's just the surface. If you dive deeper, you'll learn that the watermark for the bodycam isn't right and there is no city of Sunny Springs in Florida.

The rage-bait cinematic universe: Who even makes these videos?

The description of the channel the judge video comes from, bodycam declassified, reads, "In our channel, we bring you real, unfiltered bodycam footage, offering insight into real-world situations. In some cases, we may reenact some elements to clarify key aspects of certain encounters."

I can't find any video on this channel that features real footage; Cop Slaps Arrogant Prince in Ferrari and Gets Suspended, Black Female Lawyer Vs Arrogant Cop, and the rest of these videos are fake, unless all these encounters happened in the same building's parking lot.

Looking a little deeper into YouTube revealed a ton of these rage-bait vids, from different creators, with different stories. We got cops pulling over FBI agents, cops harassing people for taking their shoes off in the park, and my personal favorite: Dumb Cop Mess with the wrong FBI agent On Plane. Watch this and try not to laugh:

I actually like the earnestness of the creators of this video. It reminds me of the delusional incompetence of b-movie king Ed Wood: God bless them, they tried. But that is so not an airplane cabin. And that is so not a stewardess uniform. That is so not an FBI agent. And that is so not how people talk to each other on Planet Earth. The same fake plane was used in this video, too.

The "Cop vs. Judge" video is basically a reboot of a real video of Florida police pulling over Aramis Ayala, Florida’s first elected state attorney, for no reason. Comparing them makes it obvious what real body-cam footage looks like, compared to fake, but also highlights why people are drawn to the ersatz over the genuine. We don't get to see what happens to the real cop beyond momentary embarrassment. (Spoiler: nothing.)

Why are these fakes so successful?

I've been digging into the sub-genre of fake confrontation videos, and they seem, like the fake political confrontation videos I posted about last week, to point to a collective desire for Justice. Cops are often bastards, and we want to see them face consequences when they do wrong, so there are a lot of popular channels devoted to videos depicting just that. (Thanks for all the free, body-cam-based entertainment, Police of America!) But real police confrontations are generally murkier than the fakes (maybe the cops shouldn't have manhandled this guy but dude seems drunk to me), and even when the cops are clearly wrong, any "conclusion" to these stories takes years of legal wrangling. The fakes, though? Instant justice!

Why people believe in fake cop videos

The successful formula for these videos is a cop pulling someone over who is "higher" in the Justice hierarchy than a street cop. That way the offending party can face instant karma, instead of their comeuppance coming years later, in a legal filing no one will read. We want a thuggish cop to be owned by a judge in full gown while we watch. We want to see the good guys win, now, and if it's not going to really happen, we'll pull the wool over our own eyes. Real justice usually isn't exciting, it's a slog through layers of moral relativism and triple-filed paperwork, but fake justice hits hard. The biggest giveaway that these videos are fake isn’t the bad dialogue or the dodgy production design, it’s how true they feel.

(Also: the stewardess uniform.)

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