Cop suspended without pay over Vine videos

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – A Buffalo police officer was trying to be funny but his department isn’t laughing.

Buffalo Police Officer Richard Hy, a three-year veteran of the force assigned to the Housing Unit, was suspended without pay Monday afternoon for violating the department’s social media policy.

For many months he’s been doing seven-second skits under the name of Angry Cops, appearing on social media site Vine. In one such post, he appears in a Santa hat and his Buffalo Police jacket singing, “Dashing your parole, with a one gun crack arrest, throw you in a cell.”

Buffalo Police have a strict policy which reads that officers can be on social media, but not in uniform and not representing themselves as officers. You can see Richard Hy’s name tag in some of these videos and his badge. The policy also says you can’t dishonor the position of officer on social media.

In one video, he implies that he’s out of vacation days and pretends to shoot someone.

“I’m out of vacation days, shut up I just grazed you,” he said.

Sources tell WISH-TV’s sister station WIVB that Richard Hy has been warned before about his use of social media, and the department isn’t amused to see him appear in a police station pretending to ingest cocaine from the evidence locker.

“I just took a bunch of coke from the evidence locker,” Hy jokingly exclaimed in the video which depicted him fleeing from a fellow officer.

Since the story first broke, some officers are coming to Hy’s defense, saying that the videos help to break down barriers with the public and show that police officers have a human side.