Kansas cop busts out 'Love Ballad' for #PoliceCarKaraoke and finds fans nationwide

Don't look now, but the cop sitting next to you at the stop light might be singing.

Cops across the country are making music videos with the dashboard cameras in their patrol cars and posting them online in #PoliceCarKaraoke, which also uses the alias Cop Car Karaoke.

One of them, Kansas Capitol Police Officer Lamont Jackson in Topeka, scored national attention this week with a soulful rendition of "Love Ballad" by the 1970s R&B group L.T.D.

Fellow Officer Mike Pagel asked Jackson to make the video to boost the department's social media presence. The capitol police, part of the Kansas Highway Patrol, are the police for the state Capitol building and other state-owned properties in Topeka.

"I've seen other karaoke videos online but everybody else was lip syncing and thought we had a secret weapon that could actually sing, so I recruited Lamont and he agreed to do it," Pagel told WIBW in Topeka, which offered one of its reporters to help the officers make a follow-up video.

Police car karaoke videos have been popping up on police department social media accounts nationwide for a while now, with different departments adding different spins.

In Arkansas, one police officer invited kids from the community to sit with him in his car and sing everything from Natasha Bedingfield to Florida Georgia Line.

In Pasco County, Florida, one deputy channeled Will Smith to rap the theme of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air."

In Michigan, two police departments are locked in a Police Car Karaoke showdown.

For his turn in the front seat, Jackson said he picked a song he figured Pagel wouldn't know "because I wanted to bring it back to old school music that we'd gotten away from," he told WIBW.

He scored north of 100,000 views after he got a shout-out this week on "Fox and Friends," though he was misidentified as a Kansas City cop.

This story was originally published May 25, 2018 at 9:12 AM with the headline "Kansas cop busts out 'Love Ballad' for #PoliceCarKaraoke and finds fans nationwide."