There are well-known staples of the Fourth of July weekend: fireworks, cookouts – and having so much fun the neighbors call the police.

Two Asheville, North Carolina, police officers responded to a complaint Sunday morning over a homemade slip-and-slide allegedly blocking a road in the Oakley neighborhood. Kids and adults built the slide to cool off from the 85-degree heat; the officers quickly determined there were no issues.

“I’m not here to break up your fun,” Carrie Lee, one of the officers, said she told the crowd.

Then she one-upped the kids by slipping on a garbage bag and hurtling down the slide in full uniform – gun, badge and all – to the cheers and high-fives among the residents. Videos of her slide, along with fellow officer Joe Jones, were posted to Facebook and quickly went viral.

“It was her idea,” Jones said in a Twitter video afterward. “I thought I was going to be able to get out of it, because I’m too big to fit in a trash bag.”

But the neighborhood kids were motivated to get the towering cop down the slide and produced a raft large enough for his frame. He took a ride with a young boy in tow.

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“Oh, big guy!” a resident filming Jones said as he careened down the hill. Jones came to a stop in the pool.

“My butt is wet,” he said. A resident filming the ride shot back over laughter: “But don’t it feel good?”

Katlen Joyce Smith, who lives in the neighborhood, snapped a photo of the officers with five neighborhood kids.

“I still can’t handle the amazing-mess of it all,” she wrote on Facebook. “I hope the neighbor who called them saw it all go down!!”


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