Former Seattle police officer Adley Shepherd is no stranger to viral videos. Shepherd became the poster boy for police violence locally in 2014 when he slugged a handcuffed woman in the face. That incident, captured on in-car video, cost him his job. Now he’s in the spotlight again, as the unintentional breakout star of right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley’s latest opus.
The disgraced former cop went viral for losing his gun while guarding disgraced former TV reporter Jonathan Choe in Little Saigon. Choe was there with Shirley to falsely accuse a business of “EBT fraud.”
Toward the end of the video, Shirley narrates some events on the corner that Choe is filming. A fight breaks out, and Choe, following his World Star-brained instincts, decides to film it. Shirley claims that someone tried to attack Choe, but the video doesn’t show this. It shows a man who appears to throw something at Shepherd, then jump-cuts to Shepherd on top of him.
Someone comes up behind Shepherd and punches him in the side. At this point, Nick says that Shepherd dropped his gun. He goes into the crowd to get it back and winds up fighting multiple people. He’s eventually driven out by what Nick calls a “mob.”
It’s not a great look for Shepherd. A kinder client who respected him and his work would’ve cut that clip. After all, it’s irrelevant to the video’s purpose. But this is Choe we’re talking about here. He’s not one to miss out on 30 seconds of primo content, even if it means throwing his hired help under the bus.
This must’ve been a rock-bottom moment for Shepherd, who spent the better part of the last decade trying to get his job back with help from the police guild. He almost succeeded in 2018. An arbitrator ordered the department to reinstate Shepherd, calling the misconduct finding just but the termination excessive.
A judge reversed that decision in 2019, and an appellate court upheld the ruling in 2021. Finally, a court dismissed Shepherd’s wrongful termination lawsuit in 2023.
Now, he runs a private investigation business called Edrei Strategic Solutions (“Edrei” is Shepherd’s middle name). Edrei’s website claims that the business is based in Bellevue and features multiple stock photos of skyscrapers and fancy corporate conference rooms. However, the registered office address is Shepherd’s condo in Tacoma, and Edrei receives mail at a UPS store located inside a grimy Puyallup strip mall.
There’s lots of colorful puffery on Edrei’s page about how it’s the “premier executive security agency in the region,” with a “vetted team of professionals” that includes “former federal and local law enforcement, military special operations, defense contractors, and intel analysts.” But it’s unclear if anyone else works there. We couldn’t find any other “security professionals” on LinkedIn who listed Edrei as their employer.
Edrei aspires to a high-end clientele, advertising “vetted Close-Cover Executive Protection Specialists” for corporate and “[Ultra-High Net Worth] Clients,” but Shepherd, a Trump supporter who was at the January 6 riots, seems to attract a different type of business.
While Shepherd no doubt daydreams about talking into an earpiece while rushing Elon Musk into a private helicopter, his day-to-day reality is much more humiliating and much less glamorous. At Pride this year, Shepherd picked a fight with a person in a wheelchair while guarding a street preacher. He ended up punching two women in the head (his specialty) before being taken down by the crowd. Eventually, his former colleagues in the Seattle police intervened.
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