Hagar: YouTube of police allowed

Since it was created in May 2022, the Police Pursuits YouTube channel has accumulated around 192,000 subscribers, with just shy of 1.2 million views across 622 videos.

All but one of the channel’s 10 most-viewed videos involve Arkansas State Police incidents, and all but one of the 14 videos posted last week were state police incidents, mainly pursuits.

As it turns out, the channel, whose icon is a woman dressed in what appears to be a police officer costume exposing a generous amount of cleavage, is operated by a state police dispatcher, the head of the state police acknowledged.

Col. Mike Hagar, director of the state police and secretary of the Department of Public Safety, said he doesn’t approve of what the dispatcher, Chad Gibson, is doing, but he doesn’t think it violates the department’s secondary employment policy or constitutes a conflict of interest.

“I would tell Chad this if he were sitting in the room: I don’t like it, because it muddies the waters,” Hagar said Thursday. “Having said that, again, there’s no policy to prohibit it as long as he’s not doing it on duty.”

Gibson has worked as a civilian state police employee since September 2018, according to transparency. arkansas.gov, and he created the channel on May 6, 2022, posting his first video the following day.

Little Rock blogger Russ Racop on July 26 first published evidence that Gibson most likely ran Police Pursuits. Hagar said state police officials have been aware of Gibson’s side gig since at least March.

Until last week, state police spokesperson Cindy Murphy said that agency officials wouldn’t comment on questions about Gibson because they viewed it as a personnel matter.

Gibson did not respond to an email requesting an interview about his channel.

Many, if not all, of Gibson’s videos are monetized, but it’s hard to say how much money he could be making off the channel, as YouTube does not publicly display financial details.

Gibson makes Arkansas Freedom of Information Act requests at least once a week for information on pursuits and vehicle camera footage once it is available, according to a request made under the open-records law for any Freedom of Information Act requests made in his name or the name of his channel. None of the emails turned over by state police contained Gibson’s name.

The Public Safety Department’s secondary employment policy prohibits employees from divulging confidential information in the course of their secondary employment, but the information and video footage Gibson gets through open-records requests is public information.

Gibson works as a dispatcher for Troop A, where his supervisors have been closely monitoring him and have no evidence he uses the knowledge he acquires working at his day job to get his channel ahead, said Maj. Ron Casey, head of the state police Highway Patrol Division.

Troop A consists of Pulaski, Saline, Faulkner and Lonoke counties, the area where state police have the majority of their high-speed chases and, by consequence, where most of the troopers’ use of a ramming technique as a way of ending pursuits happens, police officials have said.

Policy bars employees from taking secondary employment that presents “actual or potential” conflicts of interest between their duty as a state employees and the duties of their second job.

The policy also says that, as “community role models, employees should exercise good judgment and refrain from secondary employment affiliations that demean the Department’s mission.”

Gibson’s knowledge of state police operations doesn’t represent a conflict of interest because he requests his video footage in bulk, the same as many other members of news media and content creators, opined Joan Shipley, general counsel for the Department of Public Safety.

If Gibson filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a specific incident that happened during his shift, Casey said, that would be a problem.

Casey said that while he was aware of the channel’s icon, he didn’t view it as disrespectful to the state police because the uniform featured is clearly not a trooper’s uniform. Hagar said he wasn’t aware of the channel’s icon.

“Chad’s not done anything to bring bad light on the state police,” Casey said.

SECONDARY EMPLOYMENT RULES

State police employees who want to take on a second job are required to submit a form that describes the work and the hours for approval prior to beginning employment, the secondary employment policy states.

Although Gibson started the channel in May 2022, a Freedom of Information Act request produced a secondary employment form submitted by Gibson on March 15 of this year, with a proposed start date of March 17.

On the form, Gibson says he would be self-employed and working 12 hours a week on “video editing and production.” There is no mention of the YouTube channel’s name or content, despite the fact that Gibson filed with the Arkansas Secretary of State’s office to create Police Pursuits LLC, on March 10, records show.

Prior to the interview with Hagar and Casey on Thursday, Murphy — the state police spokeswoman — wouldn’t say if Gibson’s supervisors pressed him for more details about his work, if the agency knew about the channel, or why Gibson hadn’t filed a secondary employment form before March.

Casey said Thursday one of Gibson’s supervisors told him to fill out the form when they learned of the channel’s existence. Casey said he presumed that Gibson had permission when he started the channel in 2022 under then-Col. Bill Bryant’s administration.

Bryant declined a request for comment about Gibson’s channel.

As for why it isn’t a problem that Gibson operated his channel prior to submitting a secondary employment form, Hagar said that “there’s discretion with everything.”

Civilian employees don’t face nearly as much scrutiny of their secondary employment requests as sworn troopers, Hagar said, because the two groups of employees are held to different standards and have different privileges.

Hagar doesn’t think Gibson is using his position with state police to lend credibility to his role as a video maker, he said, so he’s not improperly using the authority of his position.

DIFFERING VIEWS

Another YouTuber who covers police in the state disagrees with state police leaders’ assessment.

James Bozeman, who since 2012 has run a YouTube channel called Natural State Transparency focusing on police incidents in Arkansas, said Gibson’s intimate knowledge of what state police are doing makes his second job a conflict of interest.

Bozeman, who said he worked as a Little Rock police dispatcher, a Pulaski County sheriff’s office jailer and a civilian employee with the state police before he started his channel, said he’s keenly aware of what information Gibson has access to in the state police dispatch room, which he referred to as “the brain” of state police operations.

It would have been unethical for Bozeman to run his channel while working for a police agency, he said, and it’s improper for Gibson to do the same.

Natural State Transparency has less than half of the subscribers Police Pursuits does, but it’s not about the popularity, Bozeman said.

“I’m not worried about his competition, I’m worried about the improprieties,” Bozeman said.

One civilian law enforcement official in the state said she agrees with Bozeman.

Little Rock Emergency Communications Director Juana Green said any of her dispatchers caught doing something like what Gibson is would be disciplined.

“I would consider that extremely unethical and inappropriate,” Green said.

Moreover, Bozeman thinks Gibson’s channel is needlessly sensational, he said.

Pursuit videos, especially videos of the ramming tactics known as “precision immobilization technique,” or PIT, maneuvers or “tactical vehicle interventions,” are chart-toppers for pursuit YouTubers. Three of the 10 most-viewed videos on Gibson’s channel mention PIT in the title, and in the past week he’s uploaded at least seven videos featuring troopers ramming fleeing suspects’ vehicles.

Bozeman referred to pursuit videos as “shock stuff,” and said that while he does post those types of videos, he wants his channel to be more than just these high-speed chases that sometimes end destructively.

He prides himself in posting not just confrontation-themed police videos, but also ones that show police helping bystanders and showing humanity to people in their custody — the type of content he admits isn’t going to go viral.

“We can debunk some false narratives that all cops are out here injuring people and being bad people,” Bozeman said, describing his ethos.

Bozeman thinks his approach to police content creation is important because presenting actions in the wrong light can attract bloodthirsty commenters, he said.

“We have a crowd that desires to see people injured,” Bozeman said, clarifying that he was talking about only a minority of viewers.

Citing the channel’s icon, Bozeman also said he thinks the aesthetics of Gibson’s channel have the potential to tarnish the public’s opinion of the state police if they learn the channel belongs to a police employee.

“That doesn’t offend me, but what kind of message are you sending as a public servant working for the Arkansas State Police, when your private channel has a big, you know, endowed woman cop present on there?” Bozeman said. “What kind of message are you sending to other woman police officers, who you even work with? It’s disrespectful. He didn’t think that through.”

Two other channels that post police content primarily based in Arkansas — Arkansas Police Activity and Little Rock Hood News — responded to messages seeking comment, but did not agree to be interviewed for this article.

‘YOU’RE GOING TO BE ON YOUTUBE’

At least some state troopers are clearly aware of what Gibson and other YouTubers are doing.

In a clip posted as a YouTube Short on Gibson’s channel, a uniformed state trooper brings a handcuffed suspect in front of the hood of his patrol cruiser and points at the dash camera.

“Look right there, you’re gonna be on YouTube,” the trooper tells the man. “Say, ‘State police got me, YouTube.’ Say it.”

The suspect appears to mumble the words before the trooper escorts him out of the frame. The full video, posted on Gibson’s channel, identifies the trooper as Cody Martin. The video also includes footage of the suspect crying after he is arrested and put in the back seat.

The reaction of viewers to the clip appears mixed.

“It’s great that some officers have a sense of humor …,” one commenter wrote under the full video, with another writing, “Nice to see the ASP know what we want and like.”

“I didn’t know humiliating people was part of the arrest procedure,” one person commented on the short. Another comment called the trooper’s actions “petty and unprofessional.”

None of Gibson’s content would give viewers the idea that he’s anti-police. In fact, he sometimes indicates that he’s taken a liking to certain troopers because of their actions in pursuits, such as Trooper Jacob Byrd, who Gibson has dubbed “the legend.”

The title of a video Gibson posted Sept. 22 is titled “When you realize Trooper Byrd is pursuing *YOU STOP* — Legend ends JEEP pursuit.”

In one Freedom of Information Act request, Gibson sought video footage of pursuits made by a certain trooper across a period of three years, and said that it was possible that the video files might display an incorrect date. It wasn’t clear how he could have known that detail.

In some of his email requests, Gibson seems to have a pretty good grasp of what police vehicles and troopers were involved in a certain pursuit before he receives any footage, referring to them by name.

Hagar said he thinks the situation is just a question of rapidly advancing technology. The Department of Public Safety’s secondary employment policy — which was last updated in March — was not written to consider whether or not an employee’s personal YouTube channel might violate the policy, Hagar said.

“We have no policy to address that right now because we didn’t know we needed a policy to address that,” Hagar said. “This is a new phenomenon, we’ve never faced that issue before.”