Southlake, TX – A Texas police department played a prank on its officers who were participating in the popular lip-synch challenge by using the officers’ own voices instead of covering them with music (video below).

“What we’re going to do is you’re going to actually need to sing like for real because the public can tell whenever you’re just mouthing something,” Southlake Department of Public Safety Officer Brad Uptmore told his colleague Detective Delaney Green on video as he was preparing her for the performance.

“They’re not going to be able to hear me though, right?” Detective Delaney Green asked in the video.

“No,” Officer Uptmore promised. “That’s the point of the lip sync.”

“Okay,” Det. Green replied. “Because I seriously cannot sing.”

But Officer Uptmore had a more nefarious purpose for asking them to sing aloud for the video he was making.

In the finished video that was released to the public, Officer Uptmore began each song with the music playing as expected.

However, a few seconds into each song, when the officers got comfortable and really started belting out their best efforts for his video, the music disappeared completely, leaving each participant singing solo and a capella.

Most of the police department employees’ voices were way off key in the video.

“It sounds like something is dying,” Det. Green told WFAA-TV after she was shown the finished video she’d been duped into filming. “Like an animal is dying.”

Det. Green was only one of five Southlake officers who volunteered for the video and had no idea their real singing voices would be used.

But Patrol Corporal Blas Hernandez, who also participated in the video, had a leg up on the other officers when he performed a song from the movie “Moana.”

“I’ve been teased in the past because it came out that in high school I was in show choir,” Cpl. Hernandez told WFAA.

And truthfully, his performance was the best of the five that the Southlake Department of Public Safety included in the final lip-synch challenge video.

“I’m up for fun, I’m up for humanizing the badge, showing we’re real people,” Cpl. Hernandez said.

Officer Uptmore said he played the trick on the other officers because he wanted the video to be different than the hundreds of other lip-synch videos recently posted by police departments across the country.

“Our public had kind of been asking for it over and over, we just kept getting email after email, and I just thought we have to do something a little different to kinda step it up,” Officer Uptmore explained.

You can the video below: