COPARAZZI: TikTok famous ‘copfluencer’ made his name here

Deputy Frank Sloup’s knuckles are as white as his unmarked Dodge Charger as he speeds west along Maricopa-Casa Grande Highway.

He didn’t plan to write any tickets on his way to an interview with InMaricopa that morning — not until he clocked a turn-of-the-century Dodge Caliber zooming at 87 miles per hour in a 50 zone.

Red and blue lights strobe beside a shrewdly tongue-in-cheek sticker reading “PLEASE BE PATIENT, STUDENT DRIVER,” neatly centered on the black rally stripe that bisects his car.

With windows tinted to the legal max, it’s hard to make him out before he pops open the driver’s side door. But this criminal speeder already knows who he’s dealing with — the internet’s most viral cop, who just happens to patrol the streets around Maricopa.

As Sloup approaches the driver’s window, a furry grey puffball of a microphone muff peeks out from behind the taser tucked into his tactical vest. Not the most standard law enforcement gear, but he doesn’t want to miss a viral moment.

“I’ve seen you on social media,” the driver says.

Sloup responds: “Yeah, that’s it. I’m out there doing exactly this, stopping people from criminal speed on MCG.”

Sidekick cameraman Sam Salzwedel films the interaction from inside the cruiser and uploads it to YouTube a couple of days later. The video grabs 653,000 views right after it’s posted.

Meh, small potatoes. A single YouTube video from November sits at 41 million views.
In the last four months, the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office YouTube channel has tripled its subscribers to about 750,000. The “Fridays with Frank” show has drawn an eye-popping 262 million views on YouTube — and 36 million more on TikTok.

“I was confident that it would go well,” Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb told InMaricopa. “I wasn’t surprised it became popular. It was only surprising to me just how popular it became.”

Lamb last month touted PCSO eclipsed NYPD — the biggest and then-most followed police department in America — in social media followers.

“After 2020, there aren’t famous cops anymore,” Sloup told InMaricopa minutes after that traffic stop. “But now there’s me in Pinal County, the land of the dirt people. Here I am.”

Pilot officer

Sheriff Lamb, who was a business owner and marketer in a past life, was quick to sign his department up for A&E Network’s “Live PD” and “60 Days In.” He and his crew are accustomed to sitting in the viewfinder — and the director’s chair.

PCSO last year won an Emmy Award for its public service announcement, “Left lane campers BUSTED,” filmed by Salzwedel on State Route 347 near Maricopa and posted to YouTube.

“Sheriff Lamb is not afraid to put stuff out on the internet,” Sloup said. “He’s not afraid of the pushback, not afraid of the trolls.”

Sloup’s first cameo on the YouTube channel was meant to be a one-time deal to bring awareness to Arizona’s new texting and driving law, which came under enforcement in 2021.

“The traffic sergeant voluntold Frank to ride with the camera guy and shoot a video about texting and driving,” Salzwedel recalled. “We didn’t have any intention to keep on putting Frank on the internet after that.”

But the video went viral, and the chemistry in the car between Sloup and Salzwedel was instant and undeniable.

Enter “Fridays with Frank”— a sort of “Cops” meets “Reno 911” for the YouTube era, as the New York Post put it when the show’s virality made national headlines late last year.

Lamb announced he’ll retire his six-pointed star after seven years as the county’s top cop as he shifts his focus to a bid for U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s jilted seat. But thanks to “Fridays with Frank,” his media legacy will doubtlessly endure.

Find Frank

Deputy Sloup is dressed as a “tactical pickle,” in his own words, during an interview with InMaricopa at Copper Sky Recreation Complex Feb. 28.

“Hello, citizens!” he bellows at passersby, whose eyes widen as they snap photos of the celebrity cop to share to the “Find Frank” Facebook group’s 30,000 members.

The group was created last year by a San Tan Valley woman who prefers to remain nameless. She bills it as “Pinal County’s favorite online social media game,” an interactive take on “Where’s Waldo?” for people like 20-year-old Senita resident Zachary Owen.

Frank was at his favorite spot for a refreshing snack in Maricopa, Bahama Buck’s on Maricopa-Casa Grande Highway (he orders the Royal Princess shaved ice with a Bahama Rama Mama, by the way), when Owen found him and snapped a photo to share in Facebook group. It garnered 1,000 likes.

“In person, he’s a super cool, down-to-earth guy,” Owen told InMaricopa. “He’s a positive dude and what he’s doing is wonderful for PCSO and the community.”

“Fridays with Frank” inspired Owen, who’s a police aide at Arizona State University Police Department, to pass the academy and become a sworn law enforcement officer in the future.

“He brings positive attention to policing,” he said. “And it gives a lot of people a really good laugh.”

Haters gonna hate

Fame brings fans, but it also brings haters.

While many people ask for a selfie with the guy who just gave them a traffic ticket, others who have never met Sloup bombard him with death threats.

“Those legitimate death threats that come in go straight to the FBI and they get investigated,” Sloup said. “If you stand for anything, there are always going to be haters.”

Someone out there wants to go down in history as “the guy who shot Frank,” he said. “As I get more and more popular, there’s a better chance someone will drive by and light rounds off at me.”

But the threats don’t deter him.

Fans and haters alike prove “Fridays with Frank” accomplishes its goal of giving Arizona’s third-most populous county an identity other than that place where you stop for In-N-Out Burger between Phoenix and Tucson.

“It humanizes us, and it puts Pinal County on the map,” Sloup said.

Sheriff Lamb agreed: “Not only is it beneficial for recruiting, which has been tough for law enforcement, but the county is more in the limelight. People constantly tell me they moved to Pinal County because they love what we do.”

Ticket fare

You might think “Fridays with Frank” funnels a lot of cash into the county coffers. YouTube pays up to $29.30 per 1,000 views, according to Business Insider. That means the PCSO channel should stand to have earned as much as $7.7 million on the back of “Fridays with Frank.”

But because the channel is tied to a government agency, none of the videos are monetizable. The channel hasn’t earned a penny from YouTube despite its explosive success.

That could change soon, according to Salzwedel.

“The agency is talking about trying to monetize because there’s potential there,” he said. “We are in the process of starting to jump through some hoops to see. At this point, are we doing a disservice to the taxpayers by not taking free money from YouTube?”

The beauty of it all, though, is the show doesn’t cost anything to create. For PCSO, the recruiting and community relations benefits are beyond a justifiable return on investment.

“There’s almost no budget for it,” Lamb explained. “It doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything.”

The Brady Bunch

Once a bartender on Long Island, Sloup’s journey to internet stardom wasn’t without some choppy waters. For him, it’s a bit of a comeback story.

Sloup left two other Arizona law enforcement agencies under less-than-stellar circumstances following internal affairs investigations into whether he tampered with a police report and broke a laptop computer and tried to cover it up, among other things.

Sloup is on the Brady List, an index of law enforcement officials with credibility and honesty issues who are barred from testifying in court.

His former colleague at Scottsdale Police Department, Brandon Sullivan, is one of his most outspoken haters.

“The tone and tenor of the videos alone irritated me,” Sullivan says of “Fridays with Frank.”

“I worked around him, taking a few calls for service with him. I remember thinking that for a brand-new cop, he was an absolute f*cking jerk to every citizen and criminal he interacted with, regardless of their demeanor. I was relieved when he was fired, er, resigned.”

It was his stint with Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, however, than landed Sloup on the Brady List.

He had some unsavory things to say about his former employer after voters ousted the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio in the wake of losing more than a quarter-billion dollars in civil rights lawsuits.

MCSO is under a federal monitorship because of that catastrophe, something Sloup calls “the biggest Ponzi scheme anyone has ever seen.”

“Seeing the money they are sh*tting away… It’s a giant, federally mandated scam. It’s an abortion of the law,” he said. “The morale is terrible. The culture is terrible.”

At PCSO, Sloup says he’s never been more fulfilled in his career. And he’s got the full support of the sheriff, who questions the authority of the Brady List.

“So many agencies, out of pure spite, will put people on the Brady List,” Lamb said. “I did not agree with the termination that put him on that list. We gave him a chance because we could see the good things he did.”

Thin Green Line

YouTube and TikTok fame aren’t the only things that make Pinal County Sheriff’s Deputy Sloup “the world’s coolest cop,” as one of his fans put it last month.

Sloup recently appeared on cop-turned-stoner A.J. Jacobs’ podcast, “Blue to Green,” to bridge the gap between pot-bashing thin blue liners and cop-hating cannabis enthusiasts. The show is based in San Tan Valley.

“My sister is a pothead — always has been,” Sloup told InMaricopa. “She is the most pro-police pothead you’ll ever meet. It’s not often, but those two things can exist in the same space. It’s ignorant to think that you have to be one or the other.”

There’s no difference between weed and whiskey, Sloup said. Unlike some of his colleagues, he backed Arizona’s proposition legalizing recreational marijuana in 2020.

And while he can’t — and doesn’t want to — smoke any of the devil’s lettuce these days, “When I retire,” he said, “I might eat the head off a gummy bear and see what happens.”

‘Legit crime in Maricopa’

City Hall raved in February about its recent rank as Arizona’s second-safest city. But the city forgot to check its source, which turns out to be totally bogus. 

There are at least 28 safer places than Maricopa in Arizona, according to the same source used in that ranking — places like Queen Creek, Florence, Buckeye and even Tucson. 

The ranking came from Moving Waldo, a little-known moving broker that is not based in the U.S. and has no online reviews. 

The report said Maricopa was the safest city in Arizona after Gilbert, leading many residents to scratch their heads. InMaricopa in the last three months reported a murder, animals burned alive, a handful of shootings, kidnappings, drug dealers, hostage situations, murder threats and plenty more. Gilbert, meanwhile, has grappled with the Gilbert Goons street gang, tied to a murder and other violent crimes. 

Search for Moving Waldo on Google and the first result is a post on the social networking site Reddit, under the r/Scams subreddit. In a news release, the city said Moving Waldo was “a leading resource for relocation information.” 

Moving Waldo asserted per capita crime was higher in places like Fountain Hills and Paradise Valley than in Maricopa. There’s “not a chance” crime in those cities is higher than in Maricopa, Pinal County Sheriff’s Deputy Frank Sloup told InMaricopa in a recent interview. 

A traffic cop by day, Sloup moonlights as a sniper on a regional SWAT team alongside some officers from Maricopa Police Department. He said MPD officers often remark at the prevalence of crime in Maricopa — and PCSO data shows Maricopa isn’t even the second-safest city in the county. 

“Maricopa is busy,” he said. “There’s legit crime in the city of Maricopa.” 

Moving Waldo cites the Arizona Department of Public Safety as a source — and its own source plainly states the crime rate in Maricopa is 30% higher than in Paradise Valley, which isn’t even on Moving Waldo’s list of the five safest cities. 

Yes, some of those are towns, not cities — but despite Moving Waldo calling its list “safest cities” in Arizona, its own list includes Florence, which is a town. Heck, even the No. 1 safest “city” on the list is Gilbert, which is also a town.

And the DPS data doesn’t even include places like Fountain Hills that don’t have their own police departments, making the list of cities safer than Maricopa even longer. 

The Moving Waldo report says Florence has a crime rate of 90 per 1,000 people. That’s just a math fail — its own source states it’s just 9 per 1,000 people. That’s twice as safe as Maricopa, with a crime rate of about 20 per 1,000. Whoops. 

The report also says San Luis has a crime rate double Maricopa. But its crime rate is only half of Maricopa’s, according to the same DPS data.