BY CARA GIAIMO / 18 SEP 2015
We've got a situation.
It’s a scene procedural writers probably see in their sleep—a
burglar (or bank robber, or other ne’er-do-well) slides open a window, grabs
the jewels, and high-tails it, leaving screaming alarm sirens in his wake. The
dispatcher gets the call and picks up the radio. Who will stop this menace? Cut
to: an officer of the law or two, hanging out in the cruiser or posted up on a
corner—and munching on doughnuts.
As the New York Times put it in 1996, “no profession is as
closely identified with food as police work is with doughnuts.” Amid interviews
with real officers, the article cites a Letterman sketch, The Simpsons, and an
Ice Cube song as proof. These days, this trope is so stale you’re more likely
to see scenes making fun of it—the Law & Order episode in which terrorists
leave explosives in a doughnut box, or Wreck-it Ralph’s pastry police officers,
Wynchel and Duncan. Even Special Agent Cooper’s glazed-eyed reverence for the
treat plays, like everything else in Twin Peaks, a little camp.
But every cliché was born (or fried) for a reason. A cowboy
needs a horse, a fireman needs a dalmatian, and a doctor needs a stethoscope.
But why does a cop need a doughnut?
The common-sense response traces this tradition to the middle
of the 20th century, when police departments started switching from foot-based
beats to driving ones. Officers working a graveyard shift needed someplace to
park the cruiser, fuel up on caffeine and sugar, and maybe fill out some
paperwork or make an emergency call. Because doughnut shops had to stay open
late to prepare for the morning rush, they fit the bill nicely, explains
Michael Krondl in his book The Donut. (As fate would have it, around this same
time, two pipin’ fresh chains started sugaring up the night—though they had
each started a decade or so earlier, by the late 1950s Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’
Donuts had each sprinkled their half of the country with cop-friendly
franchises).
Meanwhile, having officers around made the shop workers feel
safe—as early as 1950, one small-time inn owner threatened a larger, litigious
hotel chain by boasting, “our High Sheriff and our local troop of state police…
help themselves to coffee and doughnuts in my kitchen when the spirit so moves
them, which seems about every day.” This foreshadowed a rash of law-enforcement
“specials”—enough that a 1964 issue of Police warned its readers, “Do not
accept gifts—donuts and coffee. This gives the impression of partiality.” In
some small towns, doughnut shops even have desks set aside for policemen who
need to work through their breaks. “This symbiotic relationship gave rise to
the popular conception of cops being addicted to doughnuts,” writes Zach W.
Brown in American Profile.
Many officers have their own personal spin on this tale.
There’s the Reno-based patrolman who caffeinated at a casino until the local
doughnut shop owner intervened, and the female captain who needed someplace to
use the restroom because she couldn’t just unzip and let rip like her
colleagues. Beyond the convenient infrastructure, there is the food itself: the
sugar, carbohydrates, and fat provide a triple-shot of energy that’s welcome
halfway through a long night of patrolling. As former Philadelphia police chief
Frank Rizzo recalls, “You got out there, walked around, rolled in the streets
with criminals, and burned the calories off.” Doughnuts are ready right away,
unlike even 24-hour diner food, and they come in a bunch of varieties (Lou
Clark of the Oakland Police Department told Krondl that in the early ‘60s,
superiors would play “guess-the-flavor” if cops returned to the station with
stains on their shirts). Plus, they’re cheap, “so they can be discarded with
little guilt in case of a hot call in the middle of a snack break,” one
policeman points out. Add all this up and the appeal is obvious. Some
departments even call them "power rings."
Stare harder into the hole, though, and the cop-doughnut
relationship isn’t just a marriage of convenience—it’s deeper than that. In
fact, we’ve officially stuffed the protecting-and-serving citizens of our
country with sugary pastries since at least World War I, when the Salvation
Army sent female volunteers to France to cook doughnuts and bring them to the
front. The originator of this tradition, a young ensign named Helen Purviance,
knelt before a potbelly stove to make the first batch in a frying pan. “There
was also a prayer in my heart that somehow this home touch would do more for
those who ate the doughnuts than satisfy a physical hunger,” she said later.
For a while, U.S. soldiers were actually called “doughboys,” and though they
may have originally gotten this nickname some other way, the millions of
doughnuts certainly didn’t hurt.
By 1927, American veterans holed up in France were demanding
so many breakfast doughnuts that the French had to send for bigger frying
kettles. When the Red Cross jumped on the bandwagon during World War II, they
churned out so many they started charging for them, a (quickly overturned)
decision that has earned them decades of enmity from the armed forces. Though
it was solidified in the war, this tradition of doughnuts-as-care goes back
even further—in a November 1898 New York Times article about a Thanksgiving
party for an NYC regiment, a volunteer cook describes serving “home-made
doughnuts” to the hungry soldiers. “No store doughnuts for our troops,” she says.
After the wars ended, the returning soldiers took their taste
for doughnuts back with them—and the relief organizations did the same with
their taste for giving them away, quickly making them a staple of various
disaster-relief efforts, where they filled the stomachs of victims and rescuers
alike—including policemen. Somewhere in the modern cop-doughnut partnership,
there’s a crumb of this original gesture of care.
In a 2012 interview, theorist Lauren Berlant spoke of how
contemporary working life “puts pressure on... small pleasures to sustain our
survival.” A doughnut is among the smallest of pleasures, but the sustenance it
provides to a working police officer is literal, social and emotional. Unlike
their wartime counterparts, police officers don’t have strict front lines—they
go where the conflict is—but doughnut shops, identical and always open, provide
areas of reliable respite. (When zones do grow more defined, so does this
parallel; the center of Boston locked down after the 2013 Boston Marathon
Bombings, but a few local Dunks stayed open, at police officers’ requests.)
“When we’re in a stakeout with another unit, we bring a dozen
doughnuts just to break the ice,” New York City Detective Tom F. Weiner Jr.
told the Times. One group of Michigan officers, blue at the prospect of their
local bakery closing, pooled their money and bought it. It’s now a 24-hour
community hotspot called—what else—Cops & Doughnuts. There you can get
cinnamon-twist “Night Shifts” and lemon-filled “Tasers.” In early September, a
customer at San Francisco’s Happy Donuts caught two police officers sitting at
a table and joking about police shootings—proof that the sense of camaraderie
in a doughnut shop can glaze over common sense. Even police who eschew
doughnuts talk about the choice in terms of their responsibilities, both to
themselves and others. Doughnuts are a headline-punchline in ubiquitous
articles about police fitness, often atop stories like this one, in which
officers talk to each other about how they overeat when agitated by their jobs.
If you can’t bring the box of doughnuts, stories about how you wanted to eat
the whole thing will suffice.
Protesters dangling donuts in front of riot cops in Montreal.
To those who already distrust law enforcement, pointing out
the doughnut connection is a way to smear frosting on the face of the powerful.
Protesters have been known to dangle doughnuts on fishing rods in front of riot
police, and there’s a Reddit group dedicated to “law enforcement abuse stories”
called “Bad Cop No Donut.”
The doughnut may be a one-sided shape, but it’s a many-sided
rhetorical weapon. No longer content to merely get their just desserts, police
are using doughnuts to give back, too—to show that they understand that in the
contemporary world, the protectors sometimes need to prove themselves. These
days, cops brandish doughnuts to poke holes in their own mythos and bond with
their communities, often simultaneously. They climb pink Dunkin’ Donuts roofs
for charity, send patrol horses through the drive-thru, or make sure they’re
the first people at the debut of a new shop. Sometimes, the jokes have local
flavor—after Oregon legalized marijuana, the Portland Police released a chart
comparing different weed amounts to the size of a popular regional doughnut.
(If you’re carrying more than one doughnut’s worth, you’re over the limit). The
website Police Daily collects photos of cops chowing down, often with big,
self-aware smiles.
“One thinks of policing as a sort of disciplinary, paternal,
stern and potentially violent occupation, and doughnuts are fluffy [and] sweet”
wrote historian Jim Paradis in an email. “The contrast… makes some effort to
humanize the cops, who greatly need humanizing.” The cops are aware of this:
Corporal Mark Ivey, who starred in a Wilmington, Pennsylvania Police Department
video called “Cops & Donuts: An Explainer,” defended the decision by
calling it “a creative way to strengthen the department’s relationship with the
community.” “By showing that you can poke fun at yourself, that you can laugh
at yourself and that you are just an everyday citizen going out there and doing
a difficult job and that you need their help, that's how you can solve this
problem," of strained relationships, Ivey said.
That’s a lot of weight for a squishy pastry—even one with the
strength of history—but anecdotal evidence reveals cops are upping their
dosage. When asked whether police ever visit the store, an employee of Union
Square Donuts in Somerville, Massachusetts affirmed. “One came in this
morning,” she said. “He got a whole box.”
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