Chattanooga, Tenn., Police Officer Michael Ampthor has an interesting “stanky leg” that he showed off at a recent Easter egg hunt. The annual Easter event is organized by Christina Howard in honor of her deceased mother, Doris Smith, who started the event. But it’s Ampthor’s dance moves that have some applauding and also giving him major side eyes.
According to CBS, the local police officers are always welcome at the event, which is now in its third year, but many people on social media seem to think that these videos only make the rounds after a police officer has killed an unarmed black person.
Chattanooga Police Chief David Roddy says it’s all about community policing:
Officer Ampthor is the epitome of what we look for to communicate to the citizens of Chattanooga what their police department is. Who we are, how we act, how much emphasis we place on relationships and trust and just being ourselves with members of the community.
Two years ago, in an article for The Establishment, Ijeoma Oluo wrote about these feel-good viral police videos and hit the nail on the head:
I understood what these “feel-good” video and picture campaigns put on by police departments really are — abuse. They are designed to remind us that they are in charge, and that they are capable of taking our lives in an instant — but if we are good and they are feeling benevolent, they won’t. These videos, combined with the countless videos of black men and women and children shot dead by cops, serve to remind us that we should both fear and love them if we want to survive. And if we don’t survive, we have nobody to blame but ourselves — see how capable of not killing us they can be?
So kudos to that cop and his stanky leg, but take it all at face value—he’s still armed, dangerous and a cop.