KINGSTON, Jamaica — Several cops are now facing disciplinary action for their alleged involvement in a new social media craze which involves uniformed personnel lip-syncing and dancing to dancehall artiste Skeng’s popular breakout hit, ‘Gunman Shift’, the number one streamed song in Jamaica for the past two weeks. 

Head of the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s Corporate Communications Unit (CCU), Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Stephanie Lindsay, confirmed that the cops were being penalised for their performance videos on Tik Tok, the video-sharing social media platform.

“A couple of videos with officers on TikTok were sent to IPROB and the officers are facing disciplinary action,” she told OBSERVER ONLINE. 

Lindsay declined to say how many cops were involved in the disciplinary probe at the Inspectorate and Professional Standards Oversight Bureau (IPROB), formerly the Inspectorate of Constabulary.

The new craze involves videos of police officers posted on TikTok dressed in full uniform with their badge numbers visible and armed with assault rifles lip-syncing the popular song. One video showed two females lip-syncing to a violence-glorifying song while brandishing government-issued rifles, and another male cop dancing sans gun in what appeared to be his living room under a Tiktok account @christophergordon666.  

The lyrics are: Intellectual murda people edition/Cock and fyah full a gun like Remington/Fully charge up eager fi kill a man/Ratty gang fimi gang p**sy run up if yuh bad/Kryptonite caah mi nuh duh di muscle fight/Inna di miggle a di night wi mek di place get noisy.

Commissioner of Police, Major General Antony Anderson, disclosed today in a virtual press conference that he was concerned about the new development.

“When you listen to the lyrics of the songs being played in the background of the video it wasn’t consistent with what we would expect or anyone would expect from our police officers. We also saw that in the videos the police officers had weapons on them and that’s certainly not the image we would expect of our officers,” he stated. 

The top cop disclosed that people who appeared in videos will have to undergo remedial training if they are going to remain in the organisation, so that they are better ‘aligned’ with the best values of the JCF. 

He revealed that the Police High Command has published guidelines in the Force Orders setting out how the issue will be dealt with going forward.