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.”