A Starbucks employee has been fired after the Los Angeles County sheriff raised concerns about a disposable coffee cup with a hand-drawn pig on it was served to one of the department’s deputies.
The deputy who received the drawing said in a post on his private Instagram account that he had stopped at a Starbucks location in Norwalk to get some caffeine in the middle of a 16-hour shift, KTLA-TV reported, adding that the deputy receiving the cup with the pig depiction said it “felt discouraging and disrespectful.”
“All I wanted was caffeine, but instead I left feeling uneasy,” the deputy wrote of the Jan. 9 incident.
Starbucks said on Tuesday that it had conducted an investigation of the incident and had fired the employee who had handed over the coffee cup at the drive-thru window, even though the investigation found that the drawing was not intentionally meant to be offensive.
Starbucks spokesperson Jaci Anderson said the drawing of a popular meme, John Pork, was created in the morning, hours before the deputy visited the coffee shop.
“This was unacceptable. We have reached out to the customer several times and leaders in the Sheriff’s Department to apologize,” Anderson said in an email. “Every customer should always be made to feel welcome in our stores.”
After hearing of the incident, L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna contacted Starbucks’ corporate security division “to formally raise concerns and to ensure accountability,” the department said in a statement.
Officials also said Luna “spoke directly with the deputy to check on his well-being.”
The Sheriff’s Department said in the statement that pig imagery “is commonly used to demean law enforcement” and called the drawing “offensive, inappropriate and unacceptable.”
The statement, posted on Facebook, drew a range of sentiment, from support for the department to jokes about what they considered the deputy’s melodramatic response.
“I hope that officers feelings are okay and will be able to make a complete recovery 🙏,” Facebook user Kevin Maytorena wrote.
Another user, John Yaya, wrote that he knew a deputy back in the 1980s who packed his own lunch and didn’t eat at local venues because of safety issues.
“Law enforcement is a thankless job..” Yaya remarked.
Multiple people commented asking if the post was meant to be satire. And still others poked fun at how ineffective internal investigations can be at rooting out problem officers and pervasive police shootings.
“The baristas investigated themselves and found they had done nothing wrong,” a user wrote.
“The deputy didn’t shoot the barista, so I chalk this up as a win,” another wrote.
