Lancaster Amateur Police Sketch

Submission 12,051

About

Lancaster Amateur Police Sketch refers to a series of jokes and memes about a "cartoonish" drawing of a suspect that led to an arrest in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Origin

On February 7th, 2018, the Lancaster City Police Department announced on Facebook ^[1] that an amateur sketch helped identify a man named Hung Phuoc Nguyen, who was suspected of sealing an undisclosed amount on February 6th. In the report, the post said, "While the sketch provided by the witness may have appeared amateurish and cartoonish, it, along with the distinctive physical descriptors, jogged the memory of at least one investigator to provide a potential suspect name."

The following day, CBS^[2] tweeted the image of the sketch next to the image of Nguyen. The post (shown below) received more than 13,000 rewteets and 30,000 likes.

Spread

Shortly after CBS made their post, people online started making jokes about the drawing. On February 8th, Twitter^[3] user @SonOfA DooG tweeted, "officer looks at doodle.
officer looks at suspect. / officer looks at doodle. / officer looks at suspect, squinting. / officer looks at doodle. / 'yup this is him.'" The tweet (shown below, left) received more than 1,700 retweets and 9,500 likes in less than four days. Twitter^[4] user @SeeDaneRun tweeted a picture of the cover for singer Jason Mraz's "We Sing, We Dane, We Steal Things" with the caption "Somewhere, @jason_mraz: 'Whew.'" The post (shown below, center) received more than 250 reweets and 3,100 likes in four days.

On February 13th, Redditor ^[5] CallMeBicBoi posted a variation of the You Vs. The Guy She Told You Not to Worry About in the /r/MemeEconomy subreddit (shown below, right)

Several media outlets covered the popularity of the photograph, including the Washington Post,^[6] TIME,^[7] NBC^[8] and more.

On February 9th, Twitter^[9] published a Moments page about the reaction to the image.