A Happy Meal voucher rewarding patient innocent New Yorkers for being frisked and found innocent three times by the NYPD has been making rounds on the web. The initiative, first announced in a video a month ago, was allegedly launched in partnership between NYPD and 365 Black, a McDonald's program geared towards helping African-American communities, as an extension of the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisk program.
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Don't print the voucher, yet! There is no free happy meal in your future, even after three frisks.
"It's fabricated," an NYPD spokesperson told Business Insider. McDonald's spokesperson Ashlee Yingling echoed the sentiment in an email, saying:
"This isn't legitimate. The press release is fabricated and McDonald's isn't participating in any such program."
Terry Malloy, the author of the "Three Strikes, You're In!" press release, told Business Insider that the parody initiative was launched to draw attention to the Stop-and-Frisk program and the innocent people that it targets. According to him, the parody turns the Stop-and-Frisk program "into a game with a delightful prize."
While a parody video hit the web over a month, the press release and a Facebook page announcing the initiative have surfaced yesterday, barely a week after Sean Gardiner reported for The Wall Street Journal that NYPD has broken its own record of people it has stopped and frisked.
"New York City police officers stopped and questioned 684,330 people last year, a record number since the department started producing yearly tallies of the tactic. The total marked a 14% increase over 2010..."
The parody website mimics the banner from the official NYPD website and even includes the little NYC.gov logo in the upper left hand corner of its web browser tab.
When asked why "Thee Strikes, You're In" chose to target McDonald's as well as NYPD, Malloy said that McDonald's has made millions off of serving low nourishment food to African-American communities.
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