Photo : Mark Makela ( Getty Images )

“This is some bullshit” are the four words you’d hope a crowd of police officers—people with actual crime to fight or maybe just actual boxes of doughnuts to eat—would say when called to question and arrest two men whose only apparent crimes occurred when the Starbucks manager decided they were criminals. She literally spoke their crimes into existence, like they were conjured on a Pinterest vision board.


I have never been a police officer, but I’ve known enough cops (including several in my family) and seen enough episodes of Law & Order and NYPD and The Wire to know that the only thing they seem to hate more than citizen review boards and overtime restrictions is paperwork. And when you make arrests, you’re required to do paperwork.

At the very least, you’d assume that they’d see this sham “crime,” chuck the deuces and then go about their day doing actual police things. But the compulsion to arrest, detain and criminalize blackness was stronger than their want to not do unnecessary paperwork, which is a thing everyone hates.


They want to jail niggers more than they want to avoid paperwork. And that’s a scary fucking thought.