Alex Zielinski of Portland Mercury last night posted a write-up of what she’d found out about the Portland Police Bureau’s dangerous “cementshake” tweet. It’s based on the same info Katie Shepherd got from the Bureau, although Zielinski more explicitly draws a straight line to the on-site report from a police lieutenant in fact being the only information they received.
This afternoon, Zielinski reports on Twitter, this is confirmed by the mayor’s liaison to the Bureau (who, I learned today, is former police union boss and total jackass, Robert King).
Also, King confirms that the cement milkshake claim came from a single PPB officer who saw “a powdery substance that appeared to cause some irritation… and he smelled something that, having worked with concrete before, seemed familiar.”
Pressed if it was just one person who believed it was quick dry cement, King says: “Yes, it’s one person at this point.”
We are drawing ever closer to confirmation that someone, whom we now know is a Portland Police lieutenant, simply saw someone else being annoyed at the coconut flakes in the vegan milkshakes and decided it just had to be cement.
Addenda
-
There’s a little bit more info about the original report of “cement” from Robert King via Katie Shepherd.
The mayor’s advisor on public safety, Robert King, doubled down im defense of the “cement milkshake” Tweet. He says an unnamed individual reported irritation of the eyes after being hit with a milkshake. Emphasizes the anonymous email mentioned below again.
So there’s still a slight confusion here on the source of the initial claim. According to Zielinski, King said it’s just the police lieutenant. According to Shepherd, King said someone said their eyes were irritated. Both report King referenced the lieutenant smelling an “odor”—which is going to turn out to be coconut.
-
I am dying to know just how often Robert King puts ice cream in his eyes that he knows the level of irritation it causes.