Charles City cops in sync with latest viral video trend

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

A social media sensation that has shown the musical — and sometimes comedic — talents of police departments, sheriffs’ offices and state patrols across the country has taken hold of the Charles City PD.

The “law enforcement lip sync challenge” has spread from city to city since it apparently began in a Texas sheriff’s office in late June, according to The Associated Press. The videos have attracted YouTube and Facebook viewings ranging from hundreds of views to tens of millions.

The Charles City Police Department’s video, posted last Friday on the department’s Facebook page, had been viewed more than 45,000 times and attracted almost 200 comments as of Tuesday evening.

Police Chief Hugh Anderson told the Press, “What happened is, everytime I would post anything on Facebook, somebody would say, ‘Hey, when are you going to do the lip sync challenge?’ And so it was just sort of a constant thing with them, with the public.

“To be honest with you, I thought it would probably go away and people would lose interest, but they didn’t,” Anderson said.

Izzy Worrall, the daughter of Lt. Brad Worrall and a 2016 Charles City High School graduate, and police reserve officer Kevin Marvin said, “‘Hey, we need to do this. We need to do this,’” Anderson said.

Izzy Worrall got together with Ryan Wolfe, a 2018 CCHS graduate who was also president of the Drama Club and heavily involved in music and speech, and they put the whole thing together, Anderson said, including planning the music and skits and doing the final editing.

“We literally just came and probably in less than an hour’s time recorded the entire thing, and it was recorded very, very quickly — maybe too quickly,” Anderson said, laughing.

“The reaction locally has been very positive. People have said that they just love it. One reaction has been mostly that we didn’t know the songs, which was true,” Anderson said.

One officer in the video, Dario Gamino, said the songs were all released before he was even born.

The video begins with Chief Anderson and eight other officers gathered around a table in City Hall, with Anderson telling them the department is too busy.

“We are not going to do the challenge,” Anderson says on the video. “I know a lot of people are asking us on Facebook. We want to do the lip sync challenge, we just don’t have time for that.”

Capt. Brandon Franke adds, “Let’s all get to work and forget about this lip sync thing.”

The video then breaks off into individual officers and groups of officers “dreaming” about what they would do, including sequences synced to “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba (the “I get knocked down and I get up again” song), “I Would Walk 500 Miles” by the Proclaimers, and even “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley, taped in, yes, the county jail.

Anderson ends the video with a message to viewers:

“To you citizens who challenged us to make this video, I now challenge you back. After you watched this video, please put yourself out of your comfort zone now and go out and do a random act of kindness — a pay-it-forward moment.

“Do something you may not normally do,” Anderson says. “Go help a veteran. Go help an elderly person. Stop at a nursing home just to say ‘hi.’ Buy a meal for somebody. Hold a door — something very, very simple.”

Anderson said the video didn’t end with the Charles City department challenging another law enforcement department, as many do, because his department had not been challenged by another law enforcement agency.

“We were challenged by the citizens and this group of citizens just kept on us. We would see people downtown and they’d say, ‘Hey! When are you doing the lip sync?’

“I started thinking that it would be great if we could do something positive out of this whole thing, and the one thing that we can do just as citizens to try to change our small part of the world is to make a little bit of a difference, by just talking to somebody, by being nice, and a lot of times it’s just by making somebody’s day,” Anderson said.

Officers participating in the video are Chief Hugh Anderson, Capt. Brandon Franke, Lt. Brad Worrall, Lt. Casey Mallory, officers Duane Ollendick and Dario Gamino and reserve officers Dusty Haberkorn, Hunter Orthmayer and Kevin Marvin.

Anderson said all the officers who participated were volunteers who did it on their own time, except for him and Franke.

“We were not volunteers,” he said. “I got back from vacation and found out that the captain and I both were sort of roped into this.”

Anderson said it’s important for people to see law officers as just regular folks who like to joke around like everyone else.

“This is, I think, refreshing to people just to see, yeah, we have fun. We probably mess around as much as the next person, sometimes even more,” he said. “A lot of times they don’t see that. They see the serious side of us as law enforcement. So it was good. It was good camaraderie-building for the officers themselves that were in the video.”

The video ends with a disclaimer that “no tax dollars were used in the production of this video — just laughs.”