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After Refusing Police Officers... Bay Area Coffee Shop Faces Brutal Consequences

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Maybe there is such a thing as bad publicity.

An Oakland coffee shop with an avowed policy of refusing to serve police officers might be getting a professional reaction from local cops who are shrugging off the blatant insult.

But the reaction in both the local community and nationwide has been different — and the backlash has been brutal.

According to SFGate, a Bay Area news site published by the San Francisco Chronicle, local cops learned of the new coffee shop’s policy last month, when Sgt. Robert Trevino was told by a barista there that the business doesn’t serve police officers.

The irony here is that Trevino sounds like exactly the kind of cop liberals say they want on the street:

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He’s a Hispanic patrolling an area with a large Hispanic population. He teaches cadets at the local police academy how to handle diversity issues. He’s apparently ethnic-minded enough to be president of the Alameda County chapter president of the National Latino Peace Officers Association.

But he’s a police officer, who’s taken an oath to protect the residents of the community, even if that means risking his own life, and by the warped standards of liberals in the post-Obama era, that means he’s the enemy.

Hasta Muerte (the name means “Until Death” in Spanish) even published a lengthy Instagram post explaining its position, and made it clear the people behind the shop don’t like white people or cops — even cops of the politically correct ethnic background.

View this post on Instagram

Last Friday February 16th a police (OPD) entered our shop and was told by one of our worker-owners that “we have a policy of asking police to leave for the physical and emotional safety of our customers and ourselves.” Since then, cop supporters are trying to publicly shame us online with low reviews because this particular police visitor was Latino. He broadcasted to his network that he was “refused service” at a local business and now the rumblings are spreading. We know in our experience working on campaigns against police brutality that we are not alone saying that police presence compromises our feeling of physical & emotional safety.  There are those that do not share that sentiment – be it because they have a friend or relative who is a police, because they are white or have adopted the privileges whiteness affords, because they are home- or business- owning, or whatever the particular case may be. If they want to make claims about police being part of the community, or claims that race trumps the badge & gun when it comes to police, they must accept that the burden of proof for such a claim is on them. OPDs recent attempts to enlist officers of color and its short term touting of fewer officer involved shootings does not reverse or mend its history of corruption, mismanagement, and scandal, nor a legacy of blatant repression. The facts are that poc, women, and queer police are complicit in upholding the same law and order that routinely criminalizes and terrorizes black and brown and poor folks, especially youth, trans, and houseless folks. For these reasons and so many more, we need the support of the actual community to keep this place safe, not police.  Especially in an area faced by drug sales and abuse, homelessness, and toxic masculinity as we see here on this block. We want to put this out to our communities now, in case we end up facing backlash because as we know OPD, unlike the community, has tons of resources, many of which are poured into maintaining smooth public relations to uphold power. It will be no surprise if some of those resources are steered toward discrediting us for not inviting them in as part of the community.

A post shared by Hasta Muerte Coffee (@hastamuertecoffee) on


The post also contained a warning:

“We want to put this out to our communities now, in case we end up facing backlash because as we know OPD, unlike the community, has tons of resources, many of which are poured into maintaining smooth public relations to uphold power,” the post states. “It will be no surprise if some of those resources are steered toward discrediting us for not inviting them in as part of the community.”

Has respect for police officers improved since Donald Trump became president?
To the cops’ credit, though, the local department seems to be taking the affront with aplomb. It must take a thick skin to be a police officer in a city where even the mayor has such low respect for the law that she alerted illegal aliens to a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (President Donald Trump branded Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf a “disgrace” for the action, according to the Washington Examiner.)

“I think their position is very clear that they don’t want the police in there, and I can respect that,” Sgt. Bryan Hubbard, vice president of the Police Officers’ Association, told SFGate.

“If they do call the police for any need, we’re going to respond professionally and give them the same level of service as anyone else regardless of their position.”

But other area businesses aren’t taking it so lightly, according to KGO, the ABC station in the Bay Area.

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“For them, to refuse service to a police officer from our community is totally outrageous,” Jose “Cheo” Ortiz, owner of nearby La Perla restaurant, told the station.

“He’s a great officer, a great man and he’s all about community. For him to come and introduce himself to a new business and receive that treatment is not acceptable.”

Commenters on social media were outraged.

Some took to the business review site Yelp to vent their feelings:

“How utterly disgusting that any business would refuse to serve police officers, who face getting shot at every day to protect all of us from the scumbags that California now shields from the rightful consequences of their actions.

“Everything that’s gone wrong with California, in a nutshell.”

Others responded on Twitter.




https://twitter.com/JohnnyB75163721/status/972093449934696452

It’s been a while since coffee shops were making news for not serving cops. That kind of disrespect seemed to die with the end of the Obama presidency when a warped federal government in the hands of Obama and Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch seemed to have declared war on the forces of law in America.

But it looks like it might be returning now.

And if the response to Hasta Muerte’s attitude is any indication, Americans outside of the liberal bubbles aren’t any more tolerant of it now than they were then.

Like and share on Facebook and Twitter to let everyone know about this coffee shop’s disrespect for cops.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
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