A cop, a slide and a fleeting moment of viral joy

Aug 07, 2023

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It’s 5:37 p.m. The soft light of the late afternoon bathes Downtown Boston in a pale golden hue. I’m supposed to be meeting a friend near Government Center station for a drink. But my eyes are fixed on a great metallic serpent that looms over the playground at City Hall Plaza Playground. This playground is part of the city’s $95 million effort to make the plaza less brutalist and more inviting, and the long, twisting serpentine form has fulfilled that promise in less than one month.

I have come to ride the Cop Slide.

Like many human interest stories that find their way into modern-day viral lore — often literally overnight — the birth of the Cop Slide was captured on video by a bystander, which was posted to Twitter on the first of August. It opens with a shot of the mostly enclosed slide, from which we can hear metallic thumping. Then, all of a sudden, a Boston police officer in a neon yellow traffic vest comes shooting out of the slide, feet first and belly down. As they tumble across the playground, we see a piece of equipment from their belt go skittering across the ground, and the person shooting the video lets out an incredulous laugh.

It looks like what would happen if you threw a stunt dummy down a chute that had been liberally greased beforehand. It doesn’t look real — but somehow, it is. Minor injuries were sustained by the cop, who we can see gingerly climbing to their feet as the video abruptly ends. But the story doesn’t end there.

What happened next demonstrates the contemporary phenomenon of viral joy. First, the video was widely shared across social platforms. Then, the moniker emerged: Cop Slide. (What else would you call a slide that so deftly chewed up and spat out an on-duty police officer?) Word of mouth escalated into national sensation. CNN, NBC, CBS, and The Independent reported their own versions of the story. Slate even asked a physicist to explain how the cop managed to gain such speed on his way down the slide. (While there’s not a definitive answer, clothing materials lacking friction and the curves of the slide may cause certain riders to descend much faster than others.) And then, the crowds started showing up and lining up, waiting their turn to dance with the Cop Slide. Shortly after, a Google Maps listing for the slide materialized, with rider reviews.

And that was just week one of the Cop Slide’s short but illustrious moment in the sun — or, screen.

It might seem perplexing, but none of this should surprise us. Raw physical comedy remains a timeless tonic — especially during times of protracted anxiety like a pandemic. Just look at the critical and box office success of last year’s “Jackass Forever,” which featured the great Steve-O being stripped naked, slathered with honey and introduced to a hive of bees — all at the humbled age of 48. When the Cop Slide video debuted online, an edited version of the video followed, with the action set to Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight.” The pounding of the song’s iconic drum solo syncs up perfectly with the sounds of the cop banging around in the slide. A newer, more advanced edit shows an entire squad of cops spilling out of the slide and piling up at the bottom.

Then there’s the fact that the physical comedy of the cop slide happened to involve, well, a cop. In recent years, police departments across the U.S. have become dangerously militarized and unaccountable. In many cases, police officers who have been caught on video abusing or even killing people have been acquitted of all charges. And while that obviously calls for far greater justice than a playground can mete out, for a great many of us, there’s something that feels cosmically satisfying about seeing a cop taken down by a slide that was meant for kids.

This gulf between the city’s intent for the Cop Slide and the way the slide has taken on a chaotic life of its own is worth appreciating. It speaks to an essential need that most cities fail to address: the need for free, public, playable environments that adults can enjoy as much as kids. Why did a Boston cop launch himself down that slide? Probably because it looked fun and it was there. That’s often all it takes to get people into public spaces like urban parks: the visible promise of a good time and easy access. The same tenet applies to playable infrastructure too.

On the eastern shores of Jamaica Pond, there’s a strange double-sided bench that looks like a taco shell. People love visiting the bench — climbing into it and then extricating themselves from it. But what many don’t realize is that the U-shaped bench is a guerrilla art project, installed without permission by MassArt professor Matthew Hincman. It was embraced by the public — and then begrudgingly allowed by the city. (The parks department initially tried to remove it, only to back down when Bostonians protested.)

The hour of the Cop Slide appears to have come and gone. The kids have reclaimed their playscape.

A few weeks after the Cop Slide video debuted, the city put metal barrier fences around the slide after dark, to deter full-sized humans from lining up. For now, it remains open during daylight hours.

And that’s how I find myself standing at the tower from which the Cop Slide starts, on a Tuesday evening in late August. But as I survey the queue of riders in front of me, I realize with sinking gloom that I’ve arrived too late. I’m the only childless adult on the premises. The hour of the Cop Slide appears to have come and gone. The kids have reclaimed their playscape. Later that evening, I will learn that the Cop Slide listing on Google Maps has been removed. Now, to the uninitiated, it’s just a slide.

But for a brief moment in time, it was all of ours: a civic moment to be savored. The Cop Slide might not have been what the city of Boston envisioned for its plaza, but it showed the world that every city (even a fuddy-duddy one like Boston) is capable of creating public places where we can laugh, cry and hurl ourselves down elements that invite us to run wild and briefly rekindle the innocence of our lost childhoods. It showed us what we can expect from public works that invite play and community.

If you build it, they will come. And by “they,” I mean everybody in the metro area. Even cops.

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