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Police Officer Bobby Whites dunks a basketball while playing with neighborhood kids in Gainesville, Fla., Jan. 15, 2016.
Gainesville Police Department via Facebook
A video of a Gainesville, Fla., police officer responding to a 911 call about kids playing in the streets “too loudly” has gone viral. In it, the officer can be seen dealing with the complaint by joining in on the game.
On Jan. 15, around 5 p.m., a 911 call went out complaining about some neighborhood kids playing basketball “loudly in the streets.”
Officer Bobby White was dispatched to the location. In the dash-cam footage, he walks up to one young man holding a basketball, asking in an incredulous tone, “Can you beileve that someone’s calling to complain about kids playing basketball in the street? Can you believe it?”
The boy fiddles with the basketball in his hand, his response inaudible, but shortly after, White grabs the basketball and proceeds to shoot hoops with them, drawing more and more attention from other kids, until a huge group can be seen in the video.
White continually chatters with the kids as he plays with them (serving up one particularly vicious dunk) before saying he has to go. Before he leaves, he tells the kids not to be “too loud,” but he also says that personally, he has no problem with basketball in the street and tells them to have fun.
“You guys play out here every day? I might bring some backup. You guys gonna be out here tomorrow? I’m going to try bring some backup out here tomorrow we’ll get a little game going,” he can be heard saying toward the end of the video, which is just over a minute long.
Text on the video, published on the Gainesville Police Department’s Facebook Page, concluded, “If you call GPD to complain about kids being kids…This is how Officer White is going to handle it. We’re going to let kids be kids. We are going to focus on the ones that commit crimes.”
In the 23 hours the video has been on the department’s page, almost 138,000 people have liked it and it has been shared almost 136,000 times, with more than 8,000 comments. It has received more than 5 million views.
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