Officer Ryan MacFadden was the ‘brainchild’ of the LOPD’s video.

LIVE OAK, Fla. — The job may be serious, but the officers at the Live Oak Police Department and the Suwannee County Sheriff’s Office are willing to have some fun.

That included members of both departments recently taking part in the Lip Sync Challenge that has swept the nation.

“I just felt like it was a good thing for the guys to do, to have fun and show the lighter side of life, I guess you can say,” LOPD Chief Buddy Williams said, adding his officers “definitely had my approval.”

Williams is a huge proponent of community policing, and the opportunity to take part in the fun lip sync craze was a way to tie into that and show the community another side to those wearing the badge.

“It’s just good for people to see that we’re just like everybody else,” said Tyler Harmon, with the SCSO. “We like to have a good time. We take our job very seriously, but we like to cut up and giggle and have fun.”
LOPD officer Ryan McFadden added: “It’s just not seriousness and, ‘Hey, we have a gun and a badge.’ We’re people and human too. We have charisma and we have character. I think that’s what shows, that we’re not always trying to put some person in jail.”

Suwannee County Sheriff Sam St. John, much like Williams, was in complete support of his officers taking part in the challenge. St. John said while it allowed the human side of the officers to be shown, he added the timing could not have been any better, with the negative perceptions circulating around law enforcement nation-wide.

“I think it’s such a good thing,” he said. “We show the public that we’re just like you, that we like to have fun. This is a way to convey it.

“This is a positive all the way around.”

Once both departments decided to take part in the positive movement — LOPD was challenged by the Jennings Police Department before challenging the SCSO — how to approach the videos became the challenge.

“When you start thinking about lip sync, a million things come to mind but you don’t know which one fits,” Williams said. “There’s a lot of songs you can lip sync to. You have to pick the right song that fits with what you want to do.”

At the LOPD, the final decision was on Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.”

The popular 1981 rock hit was a song officers both new and old knew.

The SCSO went with a medley of songs, from “A Thousand Miles” to “It’s Not Unusual” to “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” to a car scene from the movie “Tommy Boy.”

“One of our biggest things was we wanted to be a little bit different than everybody else,” Harmon said. “We didn’t want to do the traditional sit in the car. We wanted to be a little different and do the best we could.”

One way the SCSO separated its video — which was shot and produced by Kimberly Harrell Photography — from others was the inclusion of bloopers at the end.

It was an addition that paid off.

“I’ve seen more comments that they love the bloopers than the singing,” St. John said.

It also likely won’t be the only addition to the lip sync challenge craze from the local law enforcement agencies.

Williams hinted that there could be an additional video from LOPD’s management. St. John, too, said there has been nothing official set, but it likely wasn’t the SCSO’s last video.

That would be OK with the officers too.

“I personally wouldn’t mind some of us doing single cars instead of a group,” MacFadden said. “We could show off dance moves and get people to laugh.”