EDITOR’S NOTE 1/12/26 7:13 AM: According to KTLA, apparently they reached a Starbucks spokesperson luckily (?) on a Sunday evening who was authorized to immediately release a comment (?) condemning the acts of the Starbucks employee. Again, all of this occurring after our inquiry to the nepo-Captain at the Sheriff’s Information Bureau yesterday at 3:29 PM as to what the Sheriff’s Department official stance is regarding the disrespectful and disgusting treatment of a Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff.
On Friday, January 9th, Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Brandon Longoria had just completed what most civilians could barely fathom, a brutal sixteen hour shift. But at LASD, this is the new normal inside a Sheriff’s Department that has been deliberately crippled by years of anti cop rhetoric spewed, funded, and politically protected by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. These marathon shifts aren’t optional, they’re required due to a historic staffing crisis and an infrastructure that has rapidly deteriorated under Sheriff Robert Luna, leaving the remaining deputies forced to carry an impossible workload just to keep patrol coverage alive.
Longoria’s shift wasn’t just long, it was a relentless grind of nonstop calls, danger, stress, and responsibility, the kind that leaves your body running on fumes. In the middle of that exhaustion, he did what thousands of deputies and first responders do every day, he stopped for caffeine to keep going. An order was placed over the phone by the Norwalk Station to the Starbucks at 11790 Firestone Boulevard in Norwalk, and Deputy Longoria and his partner went to pick it up and pay, expecting what any customer expects, a simple transaction with no drama attached. Instead, he was handed a cup marked with a hand drawn pig and the words “accept” and “decline,” a clear nod to a pig meme circulating on TikTok.
Longoria was understandably outraged by the blatant disrespect. He asked to speak with the manager, who reportedly stood there speechless, issued a refund, yet offered no apology. Longoria then requested the corporate contact information so he could file a formal complaint. After submitting a written complaint to Starbucks corporate, he received a prompt response from a regional manager, but that reply revealed something even more troubling: the Norwalk location had not even reported the incident, despite protocol requiring immediate documentation and escalation.
This Isn’t a Prank, It’s a Symptom
This incident matters because it reflects a cultural hostility toward law enforcement that has been deliberately cultivated for years, accelerating during the pandemic and exploding in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots, then normalized by a far left progressive ideology that treats policing itself as the problem. The most alarming part is the confidence behind it. That pig wasn’t just an insult to Deputy Longoria, it was a statement. A calculated signal that the employee believed they could demean a deputy openly and face little to no consequence because the cultural winds are on their side. A society does not arrive at this point by accident. It gets here after years of elected officials feeding division, activists reducing complex public safety realities into cartoon narratives, corporations rewarding performative outrage, and leadership refusing to defend the very people holding the line unless it’s politically convenient.
When contempt becomes trendy, it doesn’t stay contained. It metastasizes. It seeps into workplaces. It becomes socially acceptable to mock, demean, and target the very people tasked with holding chaos at bay. It becomes fashionable to treat law enforcement as less than human, while still demanding that they show up instantly when danger strikes. This is the contradiction at the center of modern Los Angeles County politics: deputies are treated like villains in rhetoric, but expected to function like heroes in reality.
Starbucks: Loud Virtue, Silent Accountability
Starbucks loves to position itself as ethically superior. Yet there has been no public apology, no visible update, no clear statement about disciplinary action, and no transparency about what they plan to do to prevent it from happening again.
What makes Starbucks’ silence even more glaring is that this company has acted quickly in similar incidents elsewhere. In 2019, when an employee in Oklahoma wrote “PIG” on an officer’s cup, the employee was fired. That was decisive. That was immediate. That was Starbucks acknowledging that a paying customer, regardless of profession, should not be subjected to a derogatory slur by someone handling their food and beverage.
It remains unclear why Starbucks hasn’t taken the same decisive stance in the Norwalk incident. However, the question becomes unavoidable: has Starbucks quietly calculated that standing up for deputies simply isn’t worth the PR risk in Los Angeles County, where anti law enforcement sentiment has become fashionable in certain political circles. When a company applies “values” selectively, those values aren’t values at all, they’re marketing tactics.
LASD’s “Deep Concern” Arrived Conveniently Late
On Sunday, January 11, The Current Report sent direct inquiries to Captain Richard B. Conti at Norwalk Station and Captain Nancy Escobedo of the Sheriff’s Information Bureau requesting an official statement. Those inquiries went unanswered. Yet shortly after our outreach, both the Sheriff’s Information Bureau and ALADS suddenly issued public statements, fully aware that coverage of the incident was imminent. The timing speaks for itself: they didn’t respond to questions, they responded to optics, and the threat of being exposed for staying silent regarding the despicable treatment of one of their deputies.
The Sheriff’s Information Bureau statement claimed the department was “aware and deeply concerned” about the incident. As per usual, the statement was packed with the usual boilerplate about professionalism and respect, insisting “disrespectful actions will not be tolerated.” Blah. Blah. Blah. It asserted that the deputy reported the matter to the store manager, that the manager promised to investigate, which is in fact, is incorrect. The manager did not promise to investigate nor did she apologize. Additionally, Sheriff Luna contacted the deputy on Saturday afternoon yet a statement was not issued until Sheriff’s Information Bureau received an email requesting a formal response. Why the delay? While the statement reads like support, in reality, it’s textbook PR cleanup, released only after the story began circulating, and the department’s silence became indefensible, and now, politically inconvenient.
And the person delivering that message, Captain Nancy Escobedo, only underscores how deeply the public has come to distrust the integrity of departmental leadership. Escobedo’s promotion has raised eyebrows across the department, given that her husband Sergio Escobedo serves as Sheriff Luna’s Chief of Staff. When morale is collapsing and deputies are watching leadership positions filled through what appears to be an insider pipeline, it becomes harder for rank and file to believe anything coming out of headquarters is rooted in authentic principle. The message is unmistakable: leadership protects itself first, serves the political machine second, and only remembers deputies exist when the pressure becomes too loud to ignore.
The Anti-Cop Narrative Starts at the Top
If you want to know why a Starbucks employee felt bold enough to treat a deputy like trash, look at the political class that spends every day delegitimizing law enforcement. Anti-law enforcement sentiment does not self generate. It is nurtured. It is legitimized. It is amplified. And in Los Angeles County, too many elected officials have treated hostility toward policing as a political asset.
Consider Supervisor Janice Hahn’s recent rhetoric about a tragic shooting in Minneapolis involving ICE agents. Hahn labeled agents “undertrained and trigger happy” and accused them of “murdering” Renee Nicole Good during an operation. That kind of language is reckless because it is designed to inflame, not inform. It paints uniformed personnel as villains before facts are fully established and it conditions the public to see anyone with a badge as inherently violent, inherently suspect, inherently deserving of contempt. When leaders speak like that, it emboldens the culture that makes it acceptable for a Starbucks employee to mock a deputy with a pig doodle.
Sheriff Luna does not confront this narrative. He appears aligned with it, or too politically dependent to challenge it. Under his watch, deputy morale has plunged, recruitment has struggled, resignations and retirements have accelerated, and burnout has become a defining feature of daily life at LASD. Deputies are working mandatory overtime while leadership performs public safety optics. Deputies are handling the consequences while politicians celebrate the rhetoric. That is why this incident resonates. It is not just about coffee. It is about abandonment.
ALADS Showed Up Late, and Weak
ALADS followed the LASD statement in anticipation of the story gaining momentum in the press, after The Current Report notified the Sheriff’s Information Bureau coverage of this incident was forthcoming.
ALADS President Richard Pippin’s statement had all the force of a damp napkin, called the image “derogatory,” expressed “disappointment,” and said he hoped it was an isolated incident that would be handled appropriately with a sincere apology. Hope. That’s the full extent of their outrage. No demand for accountability. No insistence on disciplinary action. No timeline. No pressure on corporate leadership. No public defense worthy of the deputies paying dues to be represented. Just soft, carefully sanitized language designed to offend absolutely no one, including the person who humiliated a deputy after a sixteen hour shift.
Deputies need to ask themselves a hard question: what exactly are you paying for? Because when your union can’t even take a firm, unapologetic stance in a clear cut case of public disrespect, you don’t have advocacy, you have a political weather vane. If ALADS only speaks after the Sheriff speaks, then it’s not leading, it’s following. And if it only shows backbone when the optics are safe, then it’s not protecting deputies, it’s protecting its own comfort.
Starbucks must address this publicly and transparently, not with vague corporate “values” copy, but with real accountability, including a documented investigation, discipline where warranted, and a clear statement that deputies and first responders will not be targeted inside their stores.
LASD leadership must stop staging fake “support” for the cameras while treating deputies like disposable labor, only remembering they exist when the optics turn toxic and the headlines get hot. ALADS must stop hiding behind timid, lawyerly press statements meant to keep everyone comfortable and start acting like a real union, aggressive, unapologetic, and relentless in defending the deputies who fund it. And Los Angeles County’s political leadership must face the reality they’ve spent years dodging: every time they feed the anti law enforcement machine for applause and progressive clout, they aren’t just insulting deputies, they are dismantling the public safety infrastructure that keeps this county from sliding into chaos.
Deputy Longoria went to Starbucks for coffee. He walked out with a reminder that in LA County, contempt has become casual, normalized, and socially protected, so protected that people now feel emboldened to mock law enforcement to their face and expect no consequences as a result of the political elite and their far left progressive ideology.
And if this county continues treating disrespect as entertainment and leadership as theater, the fallout won’t be symbolic. It will be measurable. It will show up in empty patrol cars and communities left exposed while the same political class that created the crisis pretends to be shocked by the outcome.
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