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  • 2017-05-04 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Raleigh Restaurant Employees Sing an Offensive Song at a Group of Police Officers? (en)
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  • A deleted 28 April 2017 Raleigh Police Protective Association Facebook post claimed Smithfield’s Chicken & Barbeque Jones Sausage employees sang rap group N.W.A.'s Fuck tha Police at local officers, an assertion tabloids picked up and published without scrutiny. One 30 April 2017 item asserted there was [o]utrage after restaurant employees 'sang [sic] rap group NWA's anti-cop anthem F*** tha police at officers while they were eating in North Carolina, and a 1 May 2017 New York Post piece reported: Cooper told The News & Observer on 30 April 2017 that the incident was one of many officers have to deal with on a regular basis. But on 3 May 2017, the same outlet published an update to the story. According to both the restaurant's owner and the local police department, the incident never occurred. A single employee (who has since been fired) was said to have mouthed the phrase. Although incidents of the sort are in fact rare, false rumors about refusal of service to policeman are exceptionally common. The stories have roots in the shunned serviceman legend, which evolved in 2014 with a shunned policeman variation. David Harris, the restaurant owner, released surveillance footage demonstrating that the incident did not occur: Raleigh police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown statement unequivocally held that the the story was fabricated: Harris said he was very frustrated with the way [the business was] cast in the viral rumor, and that 400,000 hits later, we are the company that doesn’t like cops. The Facebook page responsible for the inaccurate viral firestorm published an update on 3 May 2017: Although both police in Raleigh and the business found the claim to be without merit, Harris said Smithfield's has struggled to weather the damage, adding that a couple of minutes of a post on Facebook destroyed 20 years of work. As of 4 May 2017, corrections had not been appended to several of the articles responsible for spreading the story nationally and internationally. (en)
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