THE CRULLER CRUSADERS
Why Cops Are Known for Eating Doughnuts
While most professions don’t require twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week, three-hundred-sixty-five-days-a-year staffing, first responders are an exception. Emergencies and criminal activities can occur at any time of year, day or night, and they don’t take time off, not even for Christmas. For this reason, there are always firefighters, EMTs, and police officers on duty at any given point in time. And police officers, unlike other emergency service providers, are often out on patrol at all hours of the day and night.
As you might imagine, this can be pretty boring. If you try driving around any given town at 3 a.m., you’ll find that there isn’t much to do. Even with the modern luxuries of self-serve gasoline, diners boasting late closing times, and twenty-four-hour drug stores, there aren’t a lot of businesses open at this hour. And if you look further back at the 1950s, it was even rarer to find people hard at work during the dead of night. There was one notable exception, however: doughnut shops.
Most doughnuts—the light, airy, often glazed ones that you’ll find at companies such as Krispy Kreme—are called “yeast doughnuts” because yeast causes them to rise. The rising process alone takes up to three hours. When you factor in the shaping, frying, glazing, optional jelly filling, and everything else involved in that delicious doughnut, the math paints a painstaking picture. Want to have fresh doughnuts ready for the first wave of office workers at about 6 a.m.? You’ll basically need to work through the night. “Cake doughnuts,” like apple cider doughnuts or the all-chocolate doughnuts you can get at most shops, take less time because they use baking powder and/or baking soda to rise the batter instantly as it cooks. However, most good doughnut shops will have both types, so regardless of the wonders of baking powder and baking soda, you’ll still be up late. And if you’re going to be at work overnight anyway, why not open up to customers?
For police officers working night shifts, this was pretty convenient. Driving around town, a brightly lit doughnut shop sign promising a snack, much-needed coffee, and a place to take a bathroom break was a welcome sight. And for the doughnut shop employees themselves, having officers stop by—and ideally hang out in the parking lot for a while—was great. There weren’t a lot of potential customers in the wee hours of the night, but the nature of the business (specifically during a time before credit cards) meant that these eateries often had a lot of cash on hand, making them an obvious target for crime. The cop/doughnut relationship was symbiotic.
It did, however, get out of control after a while. According to Atlas Obscura, by the 1960s, coffee shops would give free or significantly discounted doughnuts to officers in hopes of enticing them to swing by often, especially overnight. In 1964, a cop journal called Police spelled out explicitly why officers should refuse these free or discounted items: “Do not accept gifts—donuts and coffee. This gives the impression of partiality.” But this warning hasn’t stopped the practice—who would turn down a free cruller?—and the legendary love affair between police officers and the round, fried pastry continues on.