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The just-released clip begins with Kovach lying in wait on a tree-lined street. It’s known now that he was waiting for Makai Coleman, 18, to drive by. As soon as he does, Kovach pulls him over, neglecting to radio the stop in to dispatch. Kovach immediately approaches the car’s passenger side, trying one of the doors before walking around the front of the vehicle. He immediately opens the driver’s door and pulls Coleman out from behind the steering wheel.

KOVACH: You can get out. COLEMAN: For what? KOVACH: You’re going to jail. COLEMAN: For what? KOVACH: Get out. COLEMAN: For what? KOVACH: In the backseat of my car. We’ll make shit up as we go.

As they walk out of the dash cam’s view, Kovach asks Coleman if he has any weapons or drugs on him, before asking “what’s that?” As the men are off camera, it’s unclear what “that” might be, but Coleman says something that sounds like “Obviously, it’s ...”

KOVACH: Better not get smart, before I can do something to ya, even more. You think I’m playing with you.

As Kovach tosses Coleman in the car, the passenger door opens and a teenager starts to get out, while Kovach’s radio squawks about a nearby road rage incident involving a gun. With Coleman secured, Kovach ignores the call and goes after the passengers.

KOVACH: Did I tell you to get out of the car? Did I tell you to get out of the car?

The passenger immediately gets back in the car as Kovach approaches, and the real reason for this off-the-books traffic stop becomes clear.

KOVACH: Does your dad know my daughter’s in your house? PASSENGER: My dad? KOVACH: Or your mom? PASSENGER: My mom’s home.

Off camera, Gloria Morales, mother of two of Coleman’s passengers, comes out of her home.

KOVACH: Is my daughter in there? MORALES: No. Would like you to check? She’s not here. KOVACH: Then why is her computer there?

Morales has no idea, explaining that she’s just gotten home, and has been making dinner while her kids were at Walmart. Kovach immediately threatens her.

KOVACH: So if I check, and you’re lying to me, you’re going to jail. MORALES: You can check, and I’m not lying to you … I don’t know why you would accuse me of that. KOVACH: Well, I was told she was here. MORALES: Well, you were told wrong.

When Morales recognizes Kovach, he tells her that Coleman has been “harboring” his daughter, who he heard was “suicidal.” Morales explains that she doesn’t know anything about that, but she’s sorry to hear it, and can relate. Kovach responds to her display of kindness by declaring that Morales’ daughter is getting a ticket for not wearing a seat belt.

Undaunted, Morales tells Kovach he can get a warrant if he wants to search her home. Kovach petulantly shouts, “That’s fine, I will!” Kovach then turns back to Coleman’s car, where he tells Morales’ daughter about the seatbelt ticket. When she repeatedly insists that she was wearing her safety belt, he dismissively tells her to plead not guilty and take it to court.

During this interaction, Morales is not heard, so it’s possible she went back into her home. Before long, Kovach abruptly orders her back inside, and she refuses. She says she’s filming him, to show the judge when they go to court for the ticket. She chastises him for using police time to look for his daughter.

Kovach declares he will arrest her for being disorderly; when she challenges him on that, he says he’ll charge her with obstruction. When Morales says she’s calling 911, Kovach then threatens to have Morales arrested for abusing the service in a nonemergency. Soon enough, it seems to dawn on him that Morales is really going to call this in, so he suddenly releases the passengers to her.

It’s only after the Morales teens get out of the car that Kovach finally notices that his daughter, Katlyn, has been sitting in the car the entire time. In between all of his hard work tossing Coleman into his backseat and harassing the Morales family, this Keystone Kop neglected to check out the entire vehicle.

He quickly scurries over to the driver’s side.

KOVACH: Oh! She’s in the car! I didn’t even see you. Get out of the car. Get in my car.

Since he’s finally gotten what (er, who) he came for, Kovach swiftly dismisses Morales and her children as if nothing happened. In the background, it sounds as if Morales is now on the phone with authorities.

After Kovach orders Katlyn to his police car, he opens the door and lobs a curt “goodbye” at Coleman, as though that one simple word erases everything that’s happened.

But Coleman doesn’t accept that. Neither does Katlyn. While she literally wrestles with her father, Coleman goes to the car to grab a phone, ostensibly so he can film the action.

KOVACH: Goodbye. COLEMAN: What? KOVACH: Goodbye. COLEMAN: What? KATLYN: You can’t. You can’t take me, I am 18. COLEMAN: You can’t take her in, she’s an adult. Katlyn, you can get back in the car, you’re an adult. KOVACH: No you’re not. Get in my car. KATLYN: Why are you taking me? KOVACH: Get in my car. KATLYN: Why are you taking me? You have to give me a reason by law. Daddy, why are you pushing me? Why are you fucking pushing me? Why are you doing this? Turn on your camera, Makai, turn it on! You can’t. No, you can’t. You can’t arrest me for no reason. You can’t do this. KOVACH: Jesus, knock it off. COLEMAN: You can’t do this. She did nothing. Why are you putting her in the car? KOVACH: Because she was suicidal yesterday.

Blurry spectators appear in the patrol car’s rear window while Coleman continues to speak calmly. He tells Kovach that he has proof he and Katlyn were together yesterday, while Katlyn repeats that she didn’t see even her father yesterday. Kovach corrects himself and says she was suicidal on Friday. (This incident occurred on a Monday.)

Coleman tells Kovach that he’s taking him to court for this, reminds him that he wasn’t harboring a fugitive, and that Katlyn is 18 years old.

Father of the year. Cop of the year.

Kovach insists that he’s merely taking his screaming daughter to the hospital; Katlyn begs Coleman to come get her, while her boyfriend continues to calmly push back against Kovach. He asks for proof of her suicidal ideation—did she text him something that gave him that idea?

Kovach drives off while Coleman is still speaking; the video ends as Katlyn demands to be let out of the moving car.

Here’s the full dash cam video. It’s nearly nine minutes of absurdly blatant abuse of authority that will disgust you. This guy thinks he is the law, not just above it.

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Let’s tally up what we’ve got here, just in these nine minutes:

An on-duty police officer and overprotective dad GPS-tracks his daughter’s computer to a friend’s house, where he lies in wait.

He pulls a car full of teenagers over without cause, and detains one in the backseat of his car without cause, while ordering the other two to stay where they are.

He fails to report the stop to dispatch, and later ignores a radio call for an actual crime in progress.

He accuses both the driver and a concerned parent of harboring his 18-year-old daughter.

He threatens one teenager with a ticket. He threatens her mother with arrest three separate times.

He then forcibly detains his own daughter without cause, once he finally realizes she’s in the car.

Here’s a daddy-daughter palate cleanser for everyone who watched the video.

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Back to Kovach.

The incident, as Lorain’s Chronicle-Telegram describes it, happened around 6 PM. By 9:30 PM, Kovach’s superiors were at his home to seize his patrol car and duty weapons and place the 16-year force veteran on administrative leave. It turns out Gloria Morales had called authorities on Kovach, saying that he refused to leave her home.

The lieutenant who took the call, Dan Smith, learned from Coleman that this wasn’t the first time Kovach had acted like a real-life, dangerous-ass country music onesie dad with a gun.

Lt. Smith said he spoke with both Coleman and his mother, and Coleman told him that Kovach had called him on the phone the week before and threatened to take out warrants against him and threatened to go to his Army recruiter to stop his enlistment.

Kovach, meanwhile, painted a picture of a dastardly dude who had shacked up with his poor, innocent daughter. Coleman wasn’t “a good person,” Kovach said, noting that he’d even been arrested for marijuana possession!

(Note: Legalized by a 2016 vote, Ohio’s medicinal marijuana program is set to launch this fall.)

The Chronicle-Telegram reports that Kovach also claims that his ex-wife caught the couple having sex, and that Coleman threatened her when asked to leave; the paper does not mention whether Katlyn’s mother has confirmed or denied this.

Kovach also claimed that his ex-wife had told him that Coleman had announced plans to pimp Katlyn out as a sex worker—on Facebook, since the social network most reviled by teenagers is where all the millennial pimps get their start, apparently.

Unsurprisingly, Kovach’s ex-wife has no idea what the hell he’s talking about, but hey, it’s a lie that’s worked too well in the past, so why wouldn’t he try?

Sadly, his ex-wife still tried to defend his actions … sort of.

Kovach’s ex-wife told police in an April 17 interview that she did not know what Facebook post her ex-husband was referring to but that she believed he was trying to be a father and did “not want him to lose everything” as both “she and John have concerns about the relationship” between their daughter and Coleman.

Nothing the parents are saying justifies what Kovach did. None of it. Perhaps that’s why, throughout the internal investigation, Kovach also maintained that he thought his daughter was in danger of suicide, and needed medical attention.

Kovach said when he spoke with his daughter on the phone she said “If I can’t be with him, I don’t want to be here anymore,” which he took to be a suicidal threat.

While Kovach did admit to using police tools to find his daughter’s laptop, he manufactured a lawful reason to pull over Coleman, which was easily disproven by the camera footage.

He said he had tracked his daughter’s computer to the Morales’ home so he waited down the street for Coleman’s car and when he saw it, Coleman was driving at a high rate of speed and almost struck the cruiser. Lt. Ed Super, however, said in his investigative report that that was not how Coleman was driving.

Super’s investigation took less than a month. Dash cams really move things along these days.

At the end of his internal investigation, Super found that Kovach had violated the department’s standards of conduct by initiating the traffic stop on Coleman without cause, by threatening to arrest Morales, for taking Coleman into custody and saying he would make up the charges against him and for failing to back up Torres at a traffic stop. Super also found that Kovach violated the department’s policy and procedures by using his police authority to locate his daughter and by failing to tell dispatch he was conducting a traffic stop.

There’s no mention by the Chronicle-Telegram of whether the investigation viewed the way Kovach treated Katlyn as anything worthy of disciplinary action. Maybe the department’s standards of conduct, policy, and procedures just happen to embrace that creepy thing that society knows is wrong, and thus “snatching your daughter against her will” is still not a fireable offense. Because, hey, dads sure do love their daughters, am I right?

Each level of infrastructure fully exhausted its ability to punish Kovach for his remarkably appalling behavior, and his charges moved up the chain until he was terminated for gross misconduct on May 11. His case was also referred to Lorain County Prosecutor Dennis Will, so there might be criminal charges to come.

Unsurprisingly, but no less disgustingly, Kovach and his union have already appealed his firing. They’re even claiming that his behavior doesn’t qualify as gross misconduct. Arbitration is scheduled for September.

It makes you wonder just how both Kovach and his defenders do view his behavior, if they don’t view it as unacceptable.

It makes you wonder just what does qualify as gross misconduct in their eyes, if not this.