It’s easy to think that driving a cop car must give you a free pass to go as fast as you like, regardless of the situation. But one Orlando Police officer found out to his cost that the rumor isn’t true. He’s now been relieved of duty and facing charges after being pulled over for speeding then driving away from the stop.
The disgraced officer is Alexander Shaouni of the Orlando Police Department who was clocked at 80 mph (129 km/h) on his way to work in his stickered-up Ford Police Interceptor Utility by a Seminole County Sheriff’s deputy. Since the Explorer-based Interceptor was traveling in a 45 mph (72 km/h) zone and displaying no lights or sirens at the time, the deputy had no choice but to chase the SUV down.
But by the time our pursuing deputy has turned his cruiser around the Explorer is way off in the distance and we hear him exclaim that he’s traveling “over 100 mph (160 km/h) trying to catch up to him.”
The deputy finally reels in the Orlando cop at an intersection, where we see Shaouni swerve around a car holding him up, and then for a moment it looks like he’s going to pull over. He briefly slows the Ford down before thinking better of it and accelerating away, hard, eventually coming to a stop down the road at a red light.
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Bodycam footage of the interaction between the two police officers after they’d both stepped out of their cars shows Shaouni valiantly trying to suggest he’d done nothing wrong and had no idea why he’d been stopped.
“What?” he asks, as the deputy approaches. “I am going in to work, my man. Why are you trying to pull me over as I’m going to work?”
“Because you were going 80 in a 45!” replies the deputy, his voice clearly revealing his incredulity at Shaouni’s attempt to style this one out. The deputy then asks for Shaouni’s driver’s license, but the speedy Orlando officer refuses and simply jumps back into his Ford and drives away, presumably so that he wasn’t late for work.
But he won’t have to worry about that for a while. The Orlando Police Department confirmed that Shaouni was relieved of duty pending sheriff’s office and OPD internal investigations, and the New York Post reports that he was was charged with resisting an officer, reckless driving, and fleeing/eluding a law enforcement officer with lights and sirens active.