NYPD SHAKE ’N’ FAKE
Brass cried ‘poison,’ but Shack cops never got ill
The three cops at the center of the NYPD milkshake “poisoning” scandal never even got sick, and there wasn’t the slightest whiff of criminality from the get-go — but that didn’t stop police brass from rolling out the crime-scene tape and unions from dishing out empty conspiracy theories, The Post has learned.
The fullest picture yet to emerge of the incident — which came amid fraught tensions between cops and the public — is based on records and multiple interviews with police sources.
The three officers were down from The Bronx, on protest duty in lower Manhattan, on June 15 when in mid-shift, at around 7 p.m., they each bought a milkshake from the eatery through a mobile app, sources said.
The shakes were waiting for them when they arrived at the Shake Shack on the second floor of the Fulton Center at 200 Broadway a few minutes later.
The female officer picked up her strawberry shake from the front counter, and her two male colleagues grabbed their cherry and vanilla drinks from a side counter, the sources said.
Police sources said it was clear the eatery’s workers couldn’t have known that cops had placed the orders “since it wasn’t done in person.”
And the sources also noted that the workers couldn’t have dosed the drinks after the officers arrived because they were already packaged and waiting for pickup when the trio walked in.
The cops quickly found that the shakes didn’t taste or smell right, so they threw them in the trash and alerted a manager at the eatery, who apologized and issued them vouchers for free food or drinks, which they accepted, according to sources.
But when the cops told their sergeant about the incident, the sergeant called in the Emergency Service Unit to set up a crime scene at the eatery for an evidence search at around 9:20 p.m., nearly two hours after they first got the shakes.
The three were rushed to Bellevue Hospital, where they were examined and released without ever showing symptoms, sources said.
Meanwhile, a Bronx lieutenant blasted out an e-mail to the unions claiming six cops “started throwing up after drinking beverages they got from shake shack on 200 Broadway,” according to a copy of the message shared with The Post.
It was unclear why the sergeant and lieutenant escalated the situation.
Detectives easily closed the case after interviewing five employees at the Shake Shack and reviewing surveillance footage showing the shakes had been made normally, sources said.
The eatery’s milkshake machine had been cleaned before the cops ordered, according to the sources, and it still contained residual milkstone remover, a typically acidic solution used to combat buildup in dairy equipment.
But by 10:45 p.m., the Detectives
Endowment Association was declaring that police had become “ill” after being “intentionally poisoned by one or more workers at the Shake Shack.”
And Police Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch made a show of visiting Bellevue while his union declared at 10:47 p.m. that officers had come “under attack” from a “toxic substance, believed to be bleach.”
Both messages spread across social media, spawning a #BoycottShakeShack hashtag that began trending on Twitter and was still being tweeted on Sunday by users who erroneously believe NYPD members were intentionally poisoned.
At around 3 a.m. on June 16, the department was reviewing a statement on the matter, and at 4 a.m. — just over eight hours after the cops picked up their shakes — Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison announced on Twitter that there was “no criminality.”
The unions deleted their tweets and issued statements walking back their discredited claims. Privately, they blamed the lieutenant who first raised the false alarm.
Council Speaker Corey Johnson (D-Manhattan) and Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx) still demanded a probe into the unions’ “inflammatory” behavior.
A review of the incident and how it unfolded is ongoing, according to an NYPD spokeswoman.
Shake Shack did not respond to requests for comment.