The Southlake Department of Public Safety recently won a TAMI Award for “Best Video- PSA Educational with a Population Under 75,000.” The statewide award was given by the Texas Association of Municipal Information Officers (TAMIO).
The video, entitled “WHOA, why is everyone perfectly driving the speed limit?!” poked fun at the Houston Astros scandal, which had players banging on a trash can in order to alert opposing batters of upcoming pitches during the World Series.
After many reports of speeders on North Carroll, where the Southlake Police Headquarters is located, Public Information Officer Brad Uptmore was tasked with finding a way to creatively remind citizens to slow down.
In the now-viral video, Police Corporal Billy Thomas is shown running radar who notices that everyone is driving the speed limit. The camera pans back to show Firefighter Doug Carel wearing an Astros jersey banging on a trash can and pointing to the upcoming “speed trap.” The video ends with the message “we don’t care what it takes for you to slow down and follow the speed limit.” It’s followed with the wordplay “Drive Astro-nomically Safe in Southlake today.”
“For us, it was a perfect storm,” Uptmore said. “The Astros scandal was on every channel and everyone wasn’t happy with them—Rangers fans, Yankees fans, Dodgers fans, even people who don’t watch or pay attention to baseball. We searched a few days to find an actual metal garbage can and the old school Astros jersey because it has so much more recognition than the current colors. We shot and edited it in one morning.”
To date, the video has 4.3 million views on YouTube with a 98% positivity score and 336,000 views on Facebook and Twitter. The video took off on social media and spread to news stations coast to coast.
“It ignited our YouTube page overnight,” Uptmore continued. “We normally just used YouTube as a place where all of our videos are together as a reference tool, but now it’s a legitimate platform for us. We’ve gained over 10,000 followers there in the last few months.”
The video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQrYfslAGD8
