The police chief of Tampa, Florida, has apologized and is asking for a disciplinary review of herself after she flashed her badge to get out of a stop for traveling in a golf cart without a license plate, officials said Thursday.
Body camera video from a Pinellas County sheriff’s deputy captured the Nov. 12 encounter in Oldsmar, northwest of Tampa. Tampa police released the video Thursday.
Chief Mary O’Connor, who was appointed in February, was a passenger in a golf cart driven by her husband, police said in a statement.
The video shows O’Connor ask the deputy whether his body camera is on, and when he responds that it is, she says, “I’m the police chief in Tampa.” The deputy asks how she’s doing.
“I’m doing good. I’m hoping that you’ll just let us go tonight,” O’Connor says as she opens her badge case and hands it to her husband, the video shows. The deputy lets them go.
The couple own property in a “golf-cart friendly community,” O’Connor said in the statement. But vehicles outside of residential areas must have license plates.
She said in the statement that it was the first time they had left the community in the golf cart and that it was “poor judgment” to be driving it on a public roadway without appropriate tags.
O’Connor said she offered to pay any fine and apologized to the deputy. “I know that no one is above the law, including me,” she said in a statement.
Mayor Jane Castor said that O’Connor “has voluntarily reached out to the Tampa Police Professional Standards Bureau asking to receive the same discipline that any officer would receive for similar conduct” and that an internal review is underway.
Phil Helsel is a reporter for NBC News.
The post Tampa’s police chief apologizes for flashing badge during golf cart stop appeared first on NBC News.
