ORLANDO, Fla. \u2013 The head of Orlando\u2019s Carnival Festival defended the actions of Orlando police officers who were disciplined after they were captured in a viral video in which young women can be seen dancing on the officers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose officers were the best we\u2019ve experienced in years,\u201d said Guenet Gittens-Roberts, the chief experience officer for Orlando Carnival Downtown.<\/p>\n
The video was taken during the annual Carnival Festival, as people danced and celebrated Caribbean culture.<\/p>\n
Several Orlando police officers can be seen sitting on a golf cart, as young scantily clad women dance on top of the cart and at times on top of the officers.<\/p>\n
The officers can be seen smiling and laughing, but Gittens-Roberts says the video does not capture everthing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe police did their job,\u201d Gittens-Roberts said. \u201cThey actually told them to come down, but that\u2019s missing from the video.\u201d<\/p>\n
An Orlando police spokesperson told News 6 that the officers involved were suspended from working extra-duty events of this nature for four months.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe behavior displayed in the video does not reflect the professionalism expected of Orlando Police officers,\u201d the spokesperson said. \u201cThe department does not condone this type of conduct and has launched an Internal Investigation to determine whether any department policies or regulations were violated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gittens-Roberts did not think the officers deserved any discipline. In fact, she wants those specific officers to come back for future events.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey understood what the culture was like in that event,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd what they were doing is they were looking at us and they were respecting what we were doing culturally.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added that she believes discipline may have been warranted if the women had been dancing on a police vehicle, but the golf cart belonged to the festival.<\/p>\n
News 6\u2019s Mike Valente asked Gittens-Roberts if she thinks the officers should have asked the women to get off the golf cart sooner than they did.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would assume that that would be something that OPD could say to the officers, \u2018Listen, you\u2019re not accustomed to this environment, you\u2019re newer to this,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s a training moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Breaking News Alerts<\/p>\n
Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by WKMG ClickOrlando – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORLANDO, Fla. \u2013 The head of Orlando\u2019s Carnival Festival defended the actions of Orlando police officers who were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[2655,1345,7558,1099,21972,1335,139,141,140,132,19294,1045,8065],"class_list":["post-297749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-caribbean","tag-carnival","tag-dance","tag-festival","tag-officers","tag-orange-county","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-police","tag-suspension","tag-video","tag-viral"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}