Police Officers Lip-Sync as Part of Public Relations Dance
By Laura M. Holson, New York Times
This month, police officers in Norfolk, Virginia, released a video of themselves shimmying down a corridor and pumping their fists in the air, lip-syncing to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.” The video was a viral hit, viewed more than 70 million times on Facebook. It is one of the most popular entries in a lip-sync challenge initiated by police departments nationwide.
The videos have come as police departments increasingly use social media to step up their public relations efforts and try to repair their image after years of anger and protests over police brutality and fatal shootings of black people by officers.
“It is allowing the country to see us in another way,” said Cpl. William Pickering, a public information officer with the Norfolk Police Department, which created the “Uptown Funk” video. “We aren’t all robots.”
But feel-good videos go only so far to address what many black people and others see as an institutionalized bias that leaves them wary of the same law enforcement officers sworn to protect them.
This year in Sacramento, the police department released video of officers killing an unarmed man, Stephon Clark, in his backyard. In Arizona, surveillance video showed the police beating an unarmed man.
Years before that, heavily armed officers and protesters clashed in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, after outrage erupted over the fatal police shooting of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown.
“The community didn’t break the trust,” said DeRay Mckesson, a civil rights activist and one of the most prominent voices in the Black Lives Matter movement. “You can’t build that one video at a time.”
The effects of police killings can run deep: A study published last month found that they had harmed mental health in black communities.
For some police departments, efforts like the lip-sync challenge are opportunities to show that not all members of law enforcement are like the officers seen in news accounts of police brutality.
“The images are graphic,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group. “This is how police are portrayed, with guns and Tasers and pepper spray.”
Carlos Ortiz, a public relations officer for the San Antonio Police Department, said, “Most of the time you see a video of a police officer, it is because of a shooting.”
Michael Sitrick, a Los Angeles-based expert in public relations crisis management, said the videos not only show officers in a different light, but also lift morale among the officers themselves. “I’m not excusing the bad acts of a few, and neither are they,” Sitrick said.
The lip-syncing officers, he said, have “become mini-celebrities” among their peers. They are also recognized in their communities. “What makes it so effective is it is unexpected,” he said.
As part of the challenge, San Francisco police officers danced in a doughnut shop to Pharrell Williams’ “Happy.” In San Antonio, three female officers sang the Destiny’s Child song “Independent Women, Pt. 1.” Ortiz said one reason they created a video was to show women in a male-dominated business.
“They thought, all these guys are doing it, and we want to do it too,” he said.
The video from the Norfolk Police took off online after it was released on July 9. More than 191,000 people commented on the department’s Facebook page, most of the remarks supportive. Actress Sharon Stone gave the department a shoutout on Twitter. Fans sent the officers cheesecake. And the stars of the video held a meet-and-greet, giving the first 100 people to arrive a signed photograph.
Ortiz in San Antonio said videos were a way to connect with millennials who are more inclined to watch something shared on social media, rather than on the nightly news. “We are adapting to technology,” he said. At the same time, he said, “we are humanizing the police.”
But Mckesson said that if officers want to connect with their communities, law enforcement over all the country will have to change. “Nobody is denying the humanity of police officers,” he said. “But being a person with a family doesn’t excuse the actions of the institution.”
