A human resources department would normally rejoice if one of its recruitment videos went viral.
But in the case of the latest online tool from the Newport Beach Police Department, “rejoice” isn't quite the right word.
Recruitment videos for Navy SEALs are less, as one horrified clip viewer put it, “flat-out terrifying.”
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First, take a look at “Newport Beach Police Dept – Are You Qualified?”
Here's how some around the country described what they watched:
“Newport Beach: where your Call of Duty Live Action Roleplaying dreams come true. . . . Tired of sitting on your mom's couch capping pretend bad guys and
screaming a stream of obscenities while you do so? How about getting off
that couch and coming to work for us?”
“[T]he NBPD is all-white, all-male, judging from the video…”
“That Newport Beach video is flat-out terrifying. I never even want to
visit Newport Beach after watching it, not that I did anyway.”
The video caught the eye of The Agitator and went viral after sites like Boing Boing linked to it.
What really made it stand out was Agitator poster Radley Balko contrasting Newport Beach's recruitment video with one from the police force of Decatur, Georgia, which some may have assumed to be less-enlightened than their California cruisin' counterparts.
As a fellow named Jeff put it best on Agitator, “Am I the only one who guessed wrong about which video would be the militarized one and which one would be the touchy-feely one? Decatur, I apologize. And I used to live just outside Decatur.”
Whaddya all think down here in OC?
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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.