CCTV Fail: Sussex Cop Chases Himself

by NowPublic Staff | February 9, 2012 at 10:36 am

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A Sussex police officer ended up chasing himself for 20 minutes, thinking he was hot on the trail of a suspected burglar. The plainclothes cop was following the frantic instructions of a CCTV operator, and believed he was hot on his quarry's trail. Turns out that there was no real suspect; just the cop.

Maybe, had the chase gone on a bit longer, the officer would have apprehended himself, and brought himself in for interrogation.

Please let us see the CCTV footage of the cop chasing himself, so that it may be set to "Yakety Sax", as nature intended.

"With the sergeant's sides aching from laughter he pointed out to the PC that the operator had been watching him unaware that he was a pain-clothes officer – thus the PC had been chasing himself round the streets." A police source told The Daily Telegraph: "We've had a couple of funnies lately, but all taken in good spirit."

Glad they think it's funny. We're concerned, though, by the fact that those watching the CCTV cameras don't know what their own plainclothes officers look like, and that the threshold for "suspicious behavior" is so low that the cop (who was presumably not burglarizing any homes or stores) triggered the camera operator's internal panic switch.

There's also a competency question: didn't the CCTV operator notice that only the "suspect" was showing up on his cameras, and not the cop?