The NYPD-Shake Shack debacle is a window into the psyche of American police

The motto of the New York Police Department is "Fidelis ad Mortum." Like many Latin mottos, it is rather melodramatic; the words mean faithful unto death. Still, that seems like a rather ominous phrase to be adopted by local law enforcement, more befitting a branch of the military than those ostensibly tasked with protecting and serving the public.

"Faithful unto death," though, might be the perfect way into understanding the psyche of the American police force: a staunchly loyal club that frequently perceives themselves to be the ones under maximal threat. Nothing made that more obvious this week than an incident involving, of all things, milkshakes. While the debacle has resulted in plenty of jokes at the NYPD's expense, the milkshake incident more worryingly underscores the American police force's paranoia — a paranoia that, under even just slightly different circumstances, can result in tragic outcomes.

On Tuesday night, the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York issued an urgent memo describing how three of their officers had "discovered that a toxic substance, believed to be bleach, had been placed in their beverages" while they were eating at a Shack Shack near a protest in downtown Manhattan. "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," the organization breathlessly wrote, going on to warn its members to "carefully inspect" their food before eating — advice seemingly more fitting for a Roman emperor than a humble officer of the law. Sure enough, several hours later, the head of the NYPD's detective bureau admitted that, following an investigation, "there was no criminality by Shake Shack's employees." As a police source explained to the New York Daily News, "it appears that a machine used to make milkshakes at the Fulton Transit Center Shake Shack was not properly cleaned and that residue from a cleaning product that contains bleach had not been wiped or rinsed from the machine before it was put back into service." The officers who drank the milkshakes are expected to be fine.

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Being a police officer is, to some degree, a dangerous job, and a reasonable level of caution from officers is understandable. Memorably and tragically, two NYPD officers were killed while sitting in their squad car in 2014 the Saturday before Christmas; last month, two right-wing extremists allegedly tried to use the George Floyd protests to start a second civil war by killing a security officer in California. In rare cases, police have also been targeted by a minority of protesters with thrown bottles and other objects, although it's harder to justify the police feeling truly threatened in those instances, when they, after all, are the ones who have the body armor, tear gas, rubber bullets, and cars. In fact, despite a handful of alarming and high-profile cases each year, being a police officer is not even one of the country's most dangerous jobs; it is far riskier to be a pilot, a farmer, a truck driver, or a garbage man.

Nevertheless, debacles like the milkshake incident highlight the police's tendency to draw the most sinister conclusions first. Earlier this month, for example, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea shared a video of officers removing bins of rocks that had been left on the side of a street. "This is what our cops are up against: Organized looters, strategically placing caches of bricks [and] rocks at locations throughout NYC," Shea wrote. But then city councilmember Mark Treyger chimed in to say that the video had been shot in his district, a solid seven miles from the center of the city's protests, and that the bins were full of "construction debris that was left near a construction site." Likewise, an internal NYPD memo warned that protesters were potentially using ice cream containers filled with cement as makeshift weapons although, as the New York Post wrote, the cups the police discovered had "markings on the outside" that resembled "concrete sample tests commonly used on construction sites." (As of yet, no police officers are known to have been assaulted by a lobbed ice cream tub). But such paranoia isn't new, nor limited to New York; in July 2019, an Indianapolis police officer accused McDonald's workers of taking a bite out of his McChicken after he found it with a mouth-sized piece missing. "The police officer suspected an employee was targeting him because he was a cop," The Washington Post reports. As it turns out, it was nothing that nefarious: the officer had taken the bite himself, and forgotten.

But the us versus them mentality of many American police, which is stoked by police unions that drum up the perceived threat to officers, is not without severe consequences. A police officer "can avoid legal sanction for using lethal force against a person by simply saying the latter made the officer fear for his or her life," The Undefeated wrote in 2017, following the murder of Philando Castile. "'I stopped someone on the street, and I then thought my life was in danger.' Utter those magic words and the state will level no punishment if the officer commits homicide."

Police have shot and killed a child holding a toy gun, a man on his cellphone in his grandmother's backyard, a man holding a wallet, a man holding a pipe, and, this week, a man holding a flashlight — all because they've been taught, and internalized, to be afraid for their lives. Mixed with a fear of black men, you don't just get tragic outcomes; you get the state of America's policing today. Those whose job it is to protect us killed over 1,000 people last year, a quarter of whom were black. In the vast majority of encounters, Americans should be more afraid of the police than the police should be of them.

The most cynical view of the situation would be that the police benefit from being the victims, and therefore have no interest in changing their mindset. By portraying themselves as constantly under attack, the force maintains legal leeway when things turn violent. "How much latitude are we expected to grant someone because he says that he was scared?" The New Yorker asked in 2016, after Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin were killed by men who later claimed to have been frightened for their lives. "Like most voluntary descriptions of emotional states, the fear defense is useful because it is opaque. It is built to resist scrutiny." The police's victim mentality, then, isn't just one that leads to needless deaths — it's led the public, and the juries they serve on, to be complicit in them, too.

What does it mean, then, if police fear for their lives during an interaction as simple as drinking a milkshake? It means we need more seismic changes than mere anti-bias training and bans on chokeholds. To build a police force we can be proud of, we need public servants who aren't afraid of the public. We deserve protectors who are faithful not to each other, but to us.

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