The Huntington Beach Police Department wants you to know that the officer captured in a video outside a waffle joint in town grabbing, pushing and cursing at a civilian is not a member of the force. (Well, at least in this incident it wasn't …)
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According to the police department's Facebook page, Jake Vale, a Roseville comedian who has his own Jake Vale Show YouTube channel that shows his video pranks, many of which are shot in Huntington Beach, created a spoof using two actors dressed up as cops.
The fake cops–a man and a woman–were eating at Main St. Waffle at the 5 Points Plaza, where a “customer” on a cell phone kept walking past and describing to the person on the other end how the male had taken a big bite of his food or describing the chewing process like a play-by-play announcer.
The policeman finally cannot take it any longer a follows the fellow on the phone outside the restaurant, where a confrontation ensues.
“For the Huntington Beach citizens that clearly recognized the background and knew this was in Huntington Beach, we assure you these are not Huntington Beach police officers and our department played no part in this video,” reads the HBPD Facebook post. “The uniforms and police vehicle are clearly not Huntington Beach style or design. We talked with the employees of the store, and they told us that all involved with the video were friends and actors, and no real police officers from any police agency were involved.”
Unfortunately for the department, the video received national news attention and calls poured in about the Huntington Beach cop who lost his cool.
“Please remember, not everything on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter is real,” the cops plead.
What's funny is, if you go to the Jake Vale Show on YouTube now, this is what you see when you click on the video:
Ironically, one place you could still see the video, as of this post going up, was on the PD Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/HuntingtonBeachPolice.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.