Police in Springfield, Missouri have said that they are investigating after a video appeared on social media appearing to show an officer watching a movie whilst driving his police car.

The video, posted on Friday (26 May) and now viewed over 52,000 times, appears to show a police officer driving a police vehicle with a screen showing a movie on the passenger side. A voice that appears to be the person taken the video says "the popo was watching a movie".

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The footage was posted to Facebook by Jessica Uhrig, who wrote underneath that she was "speachless [sic]" before saying: "Springfield Police Officer watching a movie while on duty driving down road".

When the video was later posted to the police department's own Facebook page as a comment on a post about driver safety, the department responded that they were investigating the video. "We received this yesterday and an investigation is underway," the department wrote.

Other users said that rumours had been circulating saying that the department was blocking people from posting the video to their page, the department replied that they did not know why that was: "Users should be able to post to our page. Someone else has posted the link to the post to our page today."