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A Tampa police officer dons a clown disguise for a prostitution sting filmed for Fox's COPS. But the show may have crossed an ethical line with the idea.
By ERIC DEGGANS, Times TV Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 2, 2002
It sounds more like an old Starsky and Hutch episode than an actual police operation: dressing an undercover officer as a clown in order to fool prostitutes into incriminating themselves.
But viewers of Saturday's installment of the "reality TV" show COPS will see Tampa police Officer Tim Pasley disguised as Coco the Clown -- complete with purple hair, red lips and a flashing, bulbous nose -- engaging women in conversation until they offer sex for money and backup officers swoop in to arrest them.
The four women whose arrests are shown seem genuinely surprised that Tampa police would go to such lengths to arrest them.
And it turns out they may have a point.
Pasley said the idea for the disguise came not from fellow officers but from COPS producer Jim Langley, who spent weeks at the end of last year and early this year riding with Tampa police to film footage.
Langley provided the operation's white van, which featured hidden cameras inside to capture the conversations, signs on the outside touting Coco's services as a kiddie clown, and party favors such as cans of Silly String and noisemakers, Pasley said.
The idea surfaced after Langley, son of executive producer John Langley, saw Pasley conducting more conventional prostitute "sting" operations as part of the department's Special Operations Division, the officer said.
Pasley, a 14-year Tampa police veteran, was initially skeptical: "I had concerns . . . like getting killed. You know, (serial killer) John Wayne Gacy was a clown."
As it turns out, he needn't have worried. Every woman shown in the episode climbs into the white van after asking Pasley if he is a policeman ("A lot of them believe you can't lie . . . a common misperception in the prostitution world," he said), smiling as "Coco" pelts them will Silly String and confetti before backup officers move in.
"We have used other disguises . . . a Pizza Hut delivery boy or a taxicab driver," said Pasley, 35, who saw his Coco role in a similar way (he left special operations in January and now works as a master patrol officer). "I used to have a locker full of uniforms . . . but none of us thought of this."
Langley could not be reached for comment on how the clown idea came about. A Fox publicist said the concept may have emerged informally during conversations between producers and police.
The episode is the kind of overt scene-setting viewers rarely expect from COPS, a show that presents its footage as a fly-on-the-wall verite look at police work in departments across the country.
"(COPS) is almost as pure as it gets in terms of documentary filmmaking," Langley told the Los Angeles Times in August 2000 about the show, which last week aired its 500th episode and remains a solid performer on one of the least-watched TV days of the week. "This was the first time this worked on television, and it continues to work because of its purity."
When COPS premiered in 1989, critics assailed it as voyeuristic and exploitative, focusing mostly on poor, often drug-addicted criminals who had no lawyers to advise them not to sign consent forms allowing the program to broadcast their image.
On Saturday's episode, the women arrested in Tampa appear haggard and desperate. One says she's been arrested for prostitution four times before, and police find a crack pipe on another.
"(Arrest) is one of the only ways you can get a doctor to look at them, get them fed, get them checked for diseases such as hepatitis and AIDS," said Pasley, who is shown inhaling helium before admonishing an arrested women in a cartoonishly high voice. "This is exposing the world to what I've been seeing for 14 years."
COPS airs at 8 p.m. Saturday on WTVT-Ch. 13.