Does Starbucks have a cop problem?

Seems the company's been caught a third time, in less than six months, insulting uniformed police officers who were only trying to buy a cup of coffee.

According to USA Today:

The Seattle-based chain issued an apology this weekend after two sheriff's deputies at a Starbucks in Riverside County, California, said they were ignored at a store and left after waiting for around five minutes, possibly more.

Sheriff Chad Bianco called attention to the episode on Friday when he tweeted from his office's account saying, "Two of our deputies were refused service at Starbucks. The anti police culture repeatedly displayed by Starbucks employees must end.''

In a video posted on Facebook, Bianco said the deputies were laughed at and "were completely ignored because they were in uniform. Quite honestly, that's just not acceptable. It can't be acceptable.''

Starbucks spokesman Reggie Borges said it was inexcusable for the deputies to receive the kind of treatment they did at the Riverside shop Thursday evening.

That was in Riverside, California.

It comes hot on the heels of an incident in Oklahoma where a Starbucks barista wrote "pig" onto the coffee cup of a paying officer in uniform.  And not too long before that, there was yet another incident of police officers being asked to move to a different area of the restaurant due to leftists being "uncomfortable" in a Starbucks in Tempe, Arizona.

This is civil rights stuff.  It's downright illegal, perfect fodder for a lawsuit, and maybe the Civil Rights Commission ought to be investigating, too.

It's also a sign of something very disturbing happening in society, specifically leftist society: a blatant, dangerous culture of disrespect for law enforcement officers.  As Starbucks employees were denying officers service, elsewhere, in places like New York, officers were having buckets of water thrown on them without consequence.  Other blue cities which have demonized police have triggered for themselves de facto blue strikes where cops retire at their desks, twiddle their thumbs, and think of their pensions rather than stick their necks out to enforce laws on the mean streets based on the fact that blue cities no longer have their backs.  In such places, crime has skyrocketed.  This is what comes of the hate-cops culture of the left, and many places are hellholes as a result of it.

Starbucks seems to be a really bad perpetrator of this disrespect for cops culture, which incidentally is pretty bizarre in a food-serving establishment.  In the past, diners and donut establishments were always happy to give cops free cups of coffee to ensure goodwill and a swift response if they were ever robbed.  They also liked just the presence of cops in the establishment, because criminals prefer to keep out of such places.  That practice is no longer done, given that it looks like bribery.  But the logic of it at the time was perfectly clear — owners have always had a natural incentive to encourage police patronage to help protect their property.  These days, any good dining establishment still knows that it's a best practice to at a minimum give cops decent service since they don't give out free stuff anymore.  Starbucks employees, with a huge national establishment behind them, don't have that sense of ownership or protecting the property since there's always more money from corporate if their place gets robbed — which is why you see a lot of this garbage going on.

It seems to be a cultural issue, too.

Recall that the establishment shut itself down over the issue of a Philadelphia store manager attempting to oust a nonpaying black customer demanding to use the bathroom and taking up table space.  Starbucks invoked pieties about race in America; held a full-day workshop on racism training (if I were a black employee having to sit through that, I'd be disgusted); beat their chests in atonement; and opened their bathrooms to every bum who asked, creating quite a bit of extra work for their employees who had to clean up after them.

That wasn't a black-white issue, that was an issue around a customer's bad behavior.

This is a different issue — a civil rights issue — around whether a cop has a right to order a cup of coffee same as anyone else.  And now the outrages are piling up, with three violations in less than six months.

This company shut itself down for far less over the phony racism case in Philly and now has a clear pattern of injustice going on at its establishments.  Are these people going to shut themselves down for some educational training on that?  All we see from them are meaningless apologies, yet the anti-police culture keeps going on.  If they won't do it, maybe it's time for the law to step in, the kind with the civil rights lawyers from Washington doing an "intervention" with big, big fines and maybe a few shutdowns.  Maybe that will get their attention.