When you suspect that something is off with your milkshake, you’ve got several options, one of which is just to cut your losses and throw it out. For the NYPD on Monday night, though, the preferred recourse was to launch a Shake Shack conspiracy theory about poisoned drinks and have it debunked by the morning.
Three officers were at a Shake Shack in New York City’s Financial District around 8:30 p.m. Monday and didn’t like the taste of their milkshakes. They were taken to Bellevue Hospital and police unions jumped to what must’ve seemed like an obvious conclusion: the burger chain’s employees had intentionally poisoned them. The Detectives’ Endowment Association released a statement that used the bad shakes as evidence for the claim that police are “under attack by vicious criminals who dislike us simply because of the uniform we wear.” On Twitter, the Police Benevolent Association wrote, “When NYC police officers cannot even take meal without coming under attack, it is clear that environment in which we work has deteriorated to a critical level. We cannot afford to let our guard down for even a moment.”
Along with a variety of news reports, Shake Shack entertained the notion, tweeting, “We are horrified by the reports of police officers injured at our 200 Broadway Shack in Manhattan. We are working with the police in their investigation right now.”
If you walk around New York City now, you can see plenty of cops. They don’t generally seem too bothered, let alone concerned about the safety of their next meal. As is tradition, they’ve by and large been shielded from any threat of punishment in recent weeks, even as video of police brutality at New York’s protests (many of which demanded, at a minimum, police accountability) became a regular occurrence. When Bill de Blasio’s daughter was arrested during a protest and the Sergeants Benevolent Association published her private information on Twitter—the same weekend that a police SUV was filmed driving into protesters—the mayor got up and defended the police the next day, saying they showed “tremendous restraint overall.”
The protests brought with them a certain level of paranoia among the department and the media outlets that love to give it play. A couple of weeks ago Commissioner Dermot Shea said that bins of bricks in Gravesend, Brooklyn, which as Vice pointed out, were miles from any protests, were the work of “organized looters, strategically placing caches of bricks & rocks at locations throughout NYC.” A purported Rolex store looting turned out not to even be at a Rolex store. Shea also recently tweeted a New York Post article that he summarized as, “NYPD finds concrete disguised as ice cream at George Floyd protests,” a claim that never bore out.
With those cases as precedent, Tuesday’s early-morning tweet from NYPD Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison wasn’t much of a surprise. Shake Shack employees did not poison the cops’ milkshakes, as a “thorough investigation” showed “no criminality.” Various reports said that a machine used to make the shakes hadn’t been totally rinsed of their cleaning solution before use. The milkshakes might’ve looked like a criminal campaign because, to hear the NYPD’s public accounts, everything does.
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