Fortunately for the prankster, who goes by Devon or @devonwilldoit on TikTok, the cop on the receiving end was able to take a joke. Devon’s video of the mock confrontation has been viewed 1.7 million times online. He summarized the clip in text overlay: “Ticketed a cop for his janky parking!”
It started with the student carrying a handwritten “parking ticket” on a lined piece of notebook paper. The page, which was riddled with misspellings, indicated that the date was “Today” and the infraction was “Illigeal Parking Vialation.” The fee owed for this offense was marked “69.69$.”
Armed with this note, Devon marched up to a police car that was parked on the sidewalk.
“Evening, officer. Know why I’ve stopped you today?” he asked, knocking on the car window. “Illegal parking.”
The officer rolled down his window and took the piece of paper from the young man.
“Citizen’s arrest,” Devon added, as the officer slowly looked over the document. “Oh, how the turntables have turned!”
Finally, the inscrutable cop broke his silence. “Bro, this is a disaster,” he said, attempting to sound out the misspelled words. “Ill-i-geal? Via-la-tion? 69.69 dollar sign?”
“Yeah, I mean, you owe me $69 now,” the student said, starting to chuckle.
“Who’s your English teacher?” the cop asked.
“Ms. Rodriguez,” Devon replied.
“I’m gonna go pay her a visit,” the officer said dryly, as Devon’s act broke and he gave in to laughter.
Viewers were tickled by the encounter, with several appreciating the officer’s good-humored response.
“He’s already preparing the warrant for Ms. Rodriguez,” one commenter said.
“I like how he wasn’t an a**hole about it,” another added.
“How can this not make a cop’s day though,” said another viewer. “A harmless joke interacting with [the] community, love it.”
Others noted that with a different police officer, the interaction could have turned out much worse.
“It’s funny until he pulls the Uno reverse card and tickets you for impersonating a cop,” one viewer noted.
Devon revealed in the comments section that he was a student in Brentwood, California. A few commenters said they went to the same school and recognized the cop as a youth liaison officer.
The history of School-Police partnerships in the United States goes back to 1948, when the Los Angeles School Police Department was formed to patrol and protect schools in newly desegregated areas. In 1958, law enforcement officers were permanently assigned to schools in Flint, Michigan, as part of a strategy to improve relationships between police and youth—a program that became a model for school-based officer programs throughout the country.
In recent years, schools and advocacy groups have pushed for better documentation and clearer definitions of the partnership between officers and schools, according to the National Policing Institute. A 2021 analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education by The Center for Public Integrity found that school policing disproportionately affected Black students and students with disabilities during the 2017-18 school year.
Newsweek reached out to Devon for comment.
