What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Fake Police Bodycam Videos
No, a cop didn’t pull over a judge wearing her robes in her car. Come on.
The internet is full is misinformation, conspiracies, and lies. Each week, we tackle the misunderstandings that are going viral.
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Another week, another “gotcha” video debunked. This time it’s “Cop Pulls Over Black Judge and Lives To Regret It,” a piece of pseudo-documentary street drama that’s been viewed millions of times on YouTube and TikTok (and elsewhere, I’m sure). The video is part of a growing online video genre based on documenting cops’ confrontations with public, either through police-worn body camera footage or citizen-filmed footage. Some of these videos are real, but many of them are not.
Here’s the “Cop Pulls Over Judge” video:
The tells: bad improv in a Florida parking lot
If you have a smidge of media literacy, it’s easy to spot this as fake.
- The acting is sub-community-theater level.
- The improved dialogue is laughably on the nose.
- I’m pretty sure judges don’t wear judicial robes when they’re running errands.
- The taillight the cop supposedly broke is intact at the end of the video
That’s just the surface. If you dive deeper, you’ll learn that the watermark for the bodycam isn’t right and there is no city of Sunny Springs in Florida.
The rage-bait cinematic universe: Who even makes these videos?
The description of the channel the judge video comes from, bodycam declassified, reads, “In our channel, we bring you real, unfiltered bodycam footage, offering insight into real-world situations. In some cases, we may reenact some elements to clarify key aspects of certain encounters.”
I can’t find any video on this channel that features real footage; Cop Slaps Arrogant Prince in Ferrari and Gets Suspended, Black Female Lawyer Vs Arrogant Cop, and the rest of these videos are fake, unless all these encounters happened in the same building’s parking lot.
Looking a little deeper into YouTube revealed a ton of these rage-bait vids, from different creators, with different stories. We got cops pulling over FBI agents, cops harassing people for taking their shoes off in the park, and my personal favorite: Dumb Cop Mess with the wrong FBI agent On Plane. Watch this and try not to laugh:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/DDbG-EApbdw?autoplay=0&controls=1&rel=0&modestbranding=1&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Flifehacker.com&widgetid=2&forigin=https%3A%2F%2Flifehacker.com%2Fentertainment%2Fwhat-people-are-getting-wrong-this-week-fake-police-bodycam-videos&aoriginsup=1&gporigin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&vf=1
I actually like the earnestness of the creators of this video. It reminds me of the delusional incompetence of b-movie king Ed Wood: God bless them, they tried. But that is so not an airplane cabin. And that is so not a stewardess uniform. That is so not an FBI agent. And that is so not how people talk to each other on Planet Earth. The same fake plane was used in this video, too.
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The “Cop vs. Judge” video is basically a reboot of a real video of Florida police pulling over Aramis Ayala, Florida’s first elected state attorney, for no reason. Comparing them makes it obvious what real body-cam footage looks like, compared to fake, but also highlights why people are drawn to the ersatz over the genuine. We don’t get to see what happens to the real cop beyond momentary embarrassment. (Spoiler: nothing.)
Why are these fakes so successful?
I’ve been digging into the sub-genre of fake confrontation videos, and they seem, like the fake political confrontation videos I posted about last week, to point to a collective desire for Justice. Cops are often bastards, and we want to see them face consequences when they do wrong, so there are a lot of popular channels devoted to videos depicting just that. (Thanks for all the free, body-cam-based entertainment, Police of America!) But real police confrontations are generally murkier than the fakes (maybe the cops shouldn’t have manhandled this guy but dude seems drunk to me), and even when the cops are clearly wrong, any “conclusion” to these stories takes years of legal wrangling. The fakes, though? Instant justice!
Why people believe in fake cop videos
The successful formula for these videos is a cop pulling someone over who is “higher” in the Justice hierarchy than a street cop. That way the offending party can face instant karma, instead of their comeuppance coming years later, in a legal filing no one will read. We want a thuggish cop to be owned by a judge in full gown while we watch. We want to see the good guys win, now, and if it’s not going to really happen, we’ll pull the wool over our own eyes. Real justice usually isn’t exciting, it’s a slog through layers of moral relativism and triple-filed paperwork, but fake justice hits hard. The biggest giveaway that these videos are fake isn’t the bad dialogue or the dodgy production design, it’s how true they feel.
(Also: the stewardess uniform.)
Jan. 6 defendant who demanded ‘full compensation’ with Trump pardon now arrested for breaking into home, stealing items, cops say
David HarrisMay 20th, 2025, 11:44 am
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Zachary Alam (U.S. Attorney’s Office).
Given a second chance when President Donald Trump issued him a pardon for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, a Virginia man has landed himself back in legal hot water with an arrest for burglary, cops say.
Zachary Jordan Alam, 33, garnered headlines for not only assaulting police officers but also busting the window to the Speaker’s Lobby that Ashli Babbitt crawled through when she was shot dead by a Capitol police officer. Alam was sentenced to eight years in prison and served roughly four of those years when he was released via Trump’s pardon to most Jan. 6 defendants.
Around 11 p.m. on May 9, cops from the Henrico Police Department responded to the 3200 block of Arthurwood Place for a reported breaking and entering. Once on scene, officers spoke with the homeowners, who told them an “unknown man” entered their home through the back door.
“The man took several items before he was observed by people in the home and was asked to leave,” Henrico police told Law&Crime.
Cops tracked the man to a nearby neighborhood and arrested him. They identified the suspect as Alam. He stands accused of residential breaking and entering and vandalism. Alam has apparently bonded out of the Henrico County Jail and has a court hearing scheduled for June 24. His attorney listed in court records did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Federal agents arrested Alam in the weeks after the Jan. 6 riot. In September 2024, a jury convicted him of assaulting officers, civil disorder, destruction of government property, trespassing, disorderly conduct and picketing in a Capitol building.
Coincidentally, U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, a Trump appointee, sentenced Alam some 48 hours after the 45th and 47th president’s election victory in November. Alam defended his actions even though he said he knew they were illegal because he didn’t think the transfer of power was warranted in 2021. He also demanded a pardon.
“But I will not accept a second-class pardon,” Alam said, according to The Washington Post. “I want a full pardon with all the benefits that come with it, including full compensation.”
During the riot, Alam helped other rioters scale barriers propped up as makeshift ladders outside the Capitol. He entered the building at 2:17 p.m. through a broken window adjacent to the Senate Wing emergency exit doors, according to the statement of facts filed in his criminal case.
Alam spent 30 minutes roaming around inside the Capitol. On one floor, he tried to kick in a door. On another floor, he threw a red velvet rope from a balcony at police officers below, court documents said.
At 2:33 p.m., he was corralled in the Will Rogers corridor, where he yelled at officers, laughed, argued with other rioters, and joined the mob that pushed through the police line.
Later, he went to the Speaker’s Lobby, where he looked through the glass door inside as members of Congress and staff were evacuating the chamber.
“I’m going to f— you up,” he shouted at the front of the mob multiple times in the faces of officers standing guard.
Alam moved to the doors, punched the glass repeatedly with his fist, and shattered three glass door panes.
As he punched the door, Alam pushed up against three officers standing guard. Alam rallied the crowd, announcing that “the problem” was with the House members. Alam then used a black helmet to smash out three glass panes.
As he was leaving the area, Alam called out to fellow rioters, “We need guns, bro … we need guns.“
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In the government’s sentencing memo, seeking 136 months of incarceration — more than 11 years — prosecutors said the defendant was one of the most violent and aggressive rioters that day.
“As established at trial, he spent the day antagonizing officers and inciting other rioters, culminating in his repeated violent and forceful attempts to reach congressional members and staffers as they frantically evacuated the House floor,” prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said that after he was arrested on Jan. 30, 2021, at a motel in Denver, Pennsylvania, agents found evidence of his flight and his plans to dispose of evidence connecting him to Jan. 6. They found Alam’s journal, recording his reflections of that day and his plans to flee and conceal his identity, including setting up new bank accounts and using a “burner” phone to conceal his identity and location from law enforcement.
In his sentencing memo asking for 57 months — or nearly five years’ incarceration — Alam’s attorney, Steven Metcalf, said he traveled alone, did not physically injure anyone, and left the building after Babbitt was shot by an officer in front of Alam. His client has acknowledged the seriousness of his charges, Metcalf wrote. He also said Alam has become a public figure of scrutiny on both the left and the right of the political mayhem ensuing following Jan. 6 and has been villainized as an “Antifa activist, anarchist, and even a federal agent, banned from so-called patriot groups,” Metcalf wrote.
“Here, Mr. Alam is lost in this world. He is a loner, one who went to the Capitol on his own, and acted at times in a manner he may have believed others wanted him to act,” Metcalf wrote. “Alam wanted to fit in, it did not matter with whom, Alam just wanted to fit in somewhere because he has been rejected by everyone else in his life.”
Alam is a medical school dropout whose father is of Palestinian descent, and his mother is of Pennsylvania Dutch descent, the document said. Dropping out of medical school strained his relationship with his father. After his Jan. 6 arrest, the relationship took another wrong turn. His struggles include living for a time in a storage unit, where he would sneak in and out so others would not see him.
He showered at a local gym to get ready for the day with proper hygiene. Then COVID hit, and all the gyms closed.
“Something then changed in Alam,” the memo said. “This is how Alam ended up in his position on January 6, 2021.”
Jason Kandel contributed to this report
