Police Play Disney Songs To Keep Citizen Recordings Off YouTube

If you have a noisy neighbor who plays loud music when you’re trying to sleep, you may feel you have no choice but to call the police. But what if the police are the ones playing the loud music?

On April 4, in Santa Ana, officers responded to a report of a stolen car around 11 p.m. In a video of the events uploaded to the YouTube channel “Santa Ana Audits,” the man filming approaches several parked police SUVs surrounding a car which he later identifies as a Porsche. Suddenly, after a period of filming, the sound of Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” from the Toy Story soundtrack, starts playing through loudspeakers, seemingly from one of the police vehicles.

As the playlist cycles through several other songs from Disney movies, neighbors come out of their homes and approach the officers, complaining about the noise. One of those is Johnathan Ryan Hernandez, a Santa Ana city councilman. Hernandez asks one officer, who is holding a cell phone still playing Disney songs, “What’s going on with the music?” The officer indicates that the filming was “not letting us conduct our investigation”; when pressed further on why he’s playing music, he gestures to the camera and says, “Because it’ll be copyright infringement for him.”

Despite numerous court rulings upholding the right to record, police officers across the country continue to harass citizens who film them, even going so far as to try to grab phones and delete the footage themselves.

But within the past couple of years, officers around the U.S. have been caught playing copyrighted music when encountering citizens with cameras. When the footage is uploaded to YouTube, the video site’s algorithms can detect the presence of copyrighted content and pull the video down automatically. Many companies responsible for content creation are liti