23 June 2020

Rule 1 of Mistreatment of Cop Stories: Cops Lie

Rule 2 is see rule 1.

Case in point is a police officer producing a false report of a tampon being put in his Starbucks Frappuccino.

It is, of course, false.  What is in the picture (you can click through, but it's kind of gross) is NOT a tampon, as evidenced by the intrepid reporter who tested a tampon in a Frappuccino.

How the f%$# to you list that on your resume?
Update: This story has been updated with comment from Target, which said it has "reviewed video footage and have not found any suspicious behavior."

Last night, America was seized with horror when Bill Melugin, a reporter for the local Fox affiliate in Los Angeles, tweeted an image of a tampon being pulled from a cup with the tip of a distinctive green straw.

An off-duty LAPD officer, according to Melugin, found the tampon in a blended coffee drink he'd purchased at a Starbucks inside a Target in Diamond Bar, and later filed a report with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.

"This disgusting assault on a police officer was carried out by someone with hatred in their heart and who lacks human decency," the LAPD's union told Melugin.

………

The story, though, raised questions, and not just because of the long history of cops claiming to have been assaulted by fast-food workers, only for those claims to turn out to be nonsense. According to Melugin's reporting, the officer could only have been identified by their police credit union debit card. As anyone who's been in a Starbucks since the coronavirus pandemic began knows, though, cashiers don't handle debit cards. As the story goes, then, the cashier would have had to closely scrutinize the officer's card as they ran it through the machine and alert a barista to their identity; the barista, making the drink in plain sight, would have then have had to acquire a tampon and put it into the drink after it had been through a blender.

………

In order to see if the cop's story was even remotely plausible, Motherboard performed a science experiment. Aric Toler, a researcher at Bellingcat—an organization which analyzes open source media and has, for example, exposed the use of chemical weapons use in Syria by studying video and photographic evidence—suggested, in the interests of rigor, that we buy 10 Frappuccinos and 10 different types of tampons. Given the fact that we were biking and did not want to spend a fortune, we decided instead to try one Frappuccino and one tampon and see how that went.
You can click through for the details, but once again, we are seeing cops "Testilie."

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