A Youtube user just unearthed a video of the youngest, scrawniest, and most fresh-faced officer ever to wear a Cleveland police uniform. He’s got to be high on the list for showing the most restraint in an altercation with a mouthy civilian, too.
That’s because he’s an actor on NBC’s long-running daytime soap opera Days of our Lives. The person who uploaded the clip labeled it “Incompetent Cleveland Police” and it shows an absent-minded officer getting berated for failing to recognize a lock was picked with a hair clip (8 seconds in), and later (2:08 in) getting yelled at by an actor in a a presumably fake British accent: “What are you looking at? So this is the finest Cleveland has to offer, is it?”
I wanted to get to the bottom of this very important story and find context to this extremely controversial video. Apparently the soap opera takes place in some ambiguous midwestern town called Salem, and Wikipedia has a depressingly detailed post about the setting. This episode could very well have taken place in Cleveland, Ohio, and not some other Cleveland (Tennessee, Texas, etc.).
I googled some lines from the video and it turns out there are people who transcribe each episode (there are 12,214 episodes; who knew?). This clip uploaded today came from the Dec. 9, 2009 broadcast, I found out.
So I googled “Days of our Lives” and “12/9/2009” and the full episodes are on Youtube. If you have nothing going on in the next 45 minutes and love the combination of terrible script writing, even worse acting and the constant drone of computerized music intended to let viewers know when important scenes occur, then give it a watch.
You’re welcome, internet.
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2013.
I wish the real Cleveland police were merely incompetent, but they are also murderously unhinged and poorly trained. I heard the other day that in the entire country of Germany the police only fired 85 bullets last year, 49 of which were warning shots. In Cleveland, they fired 137 at one car containing two unarmed petty criminals. How the local and national media has let that slide is beyond me.
Yeah Cle cops are like ticking timebombs…
Then again they deal with the ABSOLUTE WORST Cle has to offer in terms of citizens…
I could never be a cop…
And this vid is dumb…..
cbrbart: So the cops in Germany don’t deal with the dregs of society there? I don’t deny that being a cop in some of the high crime sections of Cleveland carries risks, but very few cops are killed in the line of duty. Compare them to, say, convenience store clerks in the hood. Far more dangerous. Cleveland cops are poorly trained. This is why they fire too many bullets. If you call 911 they might wind up shooting your dog to death. When they were all unloading their clips and reloading and unloading more clips when they shot up that car with 137 bullets they nearly shot each other. Insanity. This is not how police operate in every major city in this world.
…and the fact that videos like this even exist on the Internet is the reason why we are all doomed.
the actor, James Scott, is British