“Does he always direct traffic like this?” we asked Michael Johnson, an officer from Georgia’s Clayton County Sheriff’s Department, who was watching on the sidewalk as his colleague Sammy Smith blasted his whistle, busted dance moves, mimed, chased down cars, and “reeled in” pedestrians at North Tryon and East 5th Street in Charlotte.
“Uh … no, he never directs traffic,” Johnson replied.
Smith had not lost his mind, however. For the entire week, the whole four-man Georgia crew has been carrying out the same kind of crowd-pleasing antics in this intersection a couple of blocks from the convention. Like many police departments in neighboring states and counties, the Georgians had been called in to help out at the DNC. They hadn’t planned to do anything special, but “we just got up here and decided to have fun doing it,” Johnson said.
