The idea that Shake Shack employees poisoned NYPD officers’ milkshakes sounded fanciful from the moment police unions immediately ran with it last week, and the New York Post has now reported that the cops involved never even got sick.
According to the tabloid’s play-by-play of the Monday night snack, three shakes—one strawberry, one cherry, one vanilla—were ordered around 7:30 p.m. across two mobile app orders. The drinks were packaged and waiting on the counters when they arrived, suggesting that any employee plot against the cops would’ve been difficult to execute, given that they couldn’t have known who would be picking them up. The cops thought the shakes tasted off, though, and a manager gave them Shake Shack vouchers as an apology.
The cops told their sergeant about the shakes, and that, reportedly, is when the incident began to blossom into opportunity: The Emergency Service Unit was called upon to set up a crime scene at the Shake Shack, and the officers were brought to Bellevue Hospital. The Post said the officers were released without ever showing symptoms, and the photo for the story shows a Shake Shack cup being labeled as important, serious evidence while an NBC News truck sits parked in the background. The container is empty—maybe the milkshake didn’t taste so bad that it couldn’t be finished.
Meanwhile, a full-on meltdown ensued. A Bronx lieutenant, the Post reported, sent police unions an email saying that not three, but six cops “started throwing up after drinking beverages they got from Shake Shack on 200 Broadway.” By 10:45 p.m., the Detectives’ Endowment Association claimed on Twitter that the cops, however many of them, had been “intentionally poisoned by one or more workers at the Shake Shack,” and the Police Benevolent Association said they had come “under attack” from a “toxic substance, believed to be bleach,” while its president visited the supposedly ailing officers at Bellevue. At the same time, the idea that there really was a poison campaign was spread far and wide:
Surveillance footage showed the shakes were not poisoned by employees—the report said some residual cleaning solution in a machine was the culprit—and the case was closed by morning. And by now the police unions that were so certain that a plot had been launched against them have deleted their tweets to that effect. But it’s not only the Post—which gave some credence to a different NYPD ice cream conspiracy theory just a few weeks ago—that’s continuing to look at the invention. As the tabloid pointed out, City Council members Corey Johnson and Ritchie Torres have called for a probe into the unions’ behavior.
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