In a pleasant series of developments, footage of Santa Ana, California police officers playing Disney hits over their loudspeakers has hit the internet—garnering nothing but wholesome support for these nostalgic tunes. Classics like Randy Newman’s scintillating “You Have a Friend in Me” can be heard in the video, as well as new favorites like “Bruno” from the Academy Award winning animated film Encanto. If there’s one thing that’s worth taking away from this heartwarming occurrence, it’s that we should all acknowledge and appreciate our law enforcement’s newfound appreciation for good music. Way to go guys—we love our boys in blue!

 

All jokes aside, the true nature of this report (and subsequent video) is pretty haunting. Bystander Johnathan Ryan Hernandez—who hilariously happens to be a city councilman member living on the street where this happened—told sources that the officer told him he was playing the music because, if the video happened to be pushed to the internet, it’d most likely get taken down for copyright infringement (do the math). The officer, who was responding to a stolen vehicle call, is a really, really bad liar. I thought cops were supposed to be the ones interrogating potential suspects. And this idiot revealed his evil plan just minutes into his arrival! We’ve seen better scheming by Scooby-Doo villains.

 

The funniest part of this interaction comes on the tail end of Hernandez and Deputy Dipshit’s interaction. The cop recognizes Hernandez as a member of Santa Ana’s city council, then proceeds to apologize (twice), before Hernandez instructs him to apologize to the unidentified cameraman, before delivering a conversational TKO, shouting “now get back in your car and do your job properly.” The officer bravely counters with another apology.

 

It could reasonably be argued that—given said officer's demeanor in the video—he was given strict instructions to play kiddie hits on the job to avoid global online scrutiny, in the event that he would’ve had to break the law himself (we felt insane writing that sentence, but it’s entirely possible). It does not matter in truth. This is a maniacal attempt at counteracting the wave of video documentation that has righteously sprouted in the years following the murder of George Floyd. It’s maniacal, but even more so, it’s mind-numbingly stupid. The Santa Ana Police Department failed to account for one key detail: the mute button. You can mute Randy Newman’s luscious, bull-froggy pipes—rendering the footage un-copyrightable—but you can’t mute video evidence of police aggression.