INQUISITR.COM / Entertainment

Salina City Cop Pulls ‘Feline Unit’ Prank During Traffic Stop On April Fools’ Day [Video]

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 01:55 PST, Apr 4, 2016

The chief of the Salina City Police Department revealed his sense of humor on April Fools’ Day by stopping a driver and telling him he needed an officer from his feline unit to sniff the car for drugs. Reportedly, the department’s chief, Eric Pratt, used to be with the canine division and couldn’t resist pranking speeders that day.

Ironically, the Inquisitr recently reported the story of a cute little girl in the U.K. who wrote a letter to the local police asking why they don’t employ police cats as well as dogs. The police department handled the inquiry well, saying they would consider setting up a feline unit, especially if there are rats in the area. It is unknown whether Pratt had heard about this and got the idea of the prank from that story.

It was on April 1 that Pratt decided to play his trick on some motorists he caught speeding in Salina, Utah. He pulled over the car for doing 91 mph in an 80 mph zone.

According to KSN.com, at first, the traffic stop is normal, with Pratt asking the driver if he realized he was traveling over the speed limit. The driver said, yes, he supposed he was going a little too fast. However, after taking the necessary paperwork from the driver, Pratt then asks the passengers in the vehicle about the strange odor coming from the car.

The driver and passengers protest their innocence about any strange odors that might be emanating from the vehicle, but Chief Pratt then explains to them, “I’m with the feline unit, the Salina Police Department’s feline unit and I have my feline partner with me.”

“So what I’m going to do, I’m going to deploy my cat around the outside of your vehicle. If the cat indicates the odor of a controlled substance, we’re going to go from there, OK?”

Pratt heads back to his police vehicle and returns with a cat, who he then introduces to the driver and passengers of the car as Officer Froo Froo of the Salina City feline unit.

Explaining that the cat had been with the Salina City police force for eight years, Pratt said that should Froo Froo detect the presence of marijuana, cocaine, or any other controlled substances in the car, he would meow three times. He says he is only allowed to let the cat sniff from outside the vehicle and that the cat responds only to the Dutch language.

The driver and passengers then look a little surprised, but they let Chief Pratt do his job, taking the cat from the alleged “feline unit” on a circuit of the entire car.

Pratt says the cat appears to have a particular interest in the woman occupying the back seat. He asks her if she has anything she shouldn’t have or if she have cats. The woman then looks confused and a little worried, saying no, they are dog people.

However at that stage, Pratt couldn’t keep it up any longer and explained to them he had been playing an April Fools’ joke on them, causing much hilarity, and a certain amount of relief, among the group in the car.

Pratt ended by telling them he has been wanting to do the prank for a long time, asking them if they would mind him posting the video footage to the department’s Facebook page. He also asked them to keep the speed down in future.

Reportedly, since it was posted to Facebook, the video has gone viral and has received more than three million views. Watch the fun in the video included below.

[Photo via Flickr by Nebojsa Mladjenovic, cropped and resized/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Share this article: Salina City Cop Pulls ‘Feline Unit’ Prank During Traffic Stop On April Fools’ Day [Video]
april fools day
More from Inquisitr