Short version: guy posing as a cop calls random restaurants impersonating a police officer and convinces staff to commit escalating acts of sexual violence against arbitrarily singled out female employees. He successfully pulls this off dozens of times and gets away with it (a suspect was arrested but not convicted).
People are such fucking slaves to cops.
I don’t even know if you can pin this one specifically on cops being cops (though I don’t doubt for a second that’s a contributing factor). A group called PrankNet carried out similar acts by impersonating professions such as insurance adjustors, hotel employees, and firefighters.
Yeah, it’s more about risk/risk mitigation in an authoritarian society, but cops, judges, military, and specific parts of the government represent the top of that society. The same phenomenon occurs in those phone scams with the elderly to give them all their money in Google Play cards, or whatever.
i seem to recall there were other restaurants they tried it on, and like some non-loser took the call and told the caller to go ahead and come down and do it themselves before hanging up. or something like that.
like they could exercise a minimum level of common sense and realized something was total bullshit about a cop vesting power in another person to sexually assault a minor over the phone.
I think it’s got a lot to do with how people treat service workers and inversely how service workers (especially young female service workers) are taught to see themselves too. There’s a reason all these incidents happened at restaurants and grocery stores and not other worksites.
They made a movie about this — not sure if the Wikipedia article mentions it — Compliance.
I can see why the guy wasn’t convicted though. The people who participated wanted to participate (except the victim). The managers involved definitely wanted to do those things. They absolutely could have ended the call but it justified their fantasies. At least that was the read I got from the movie. Like this guy’s too beta to make the move but the caller justifies his authority.
I’m 99% sure it was some MKULTRA shit to test psychological techniques to convince people to do whatever handlers needed.
There was not a single point in time they should have taken the callers word for this shit.
The managers should be in prison
Reminds me of that Stanford prison experiment where they told some people to larp as prison guards and they became heinous pigs within a week
Super similar because the researchers spent the whole time telling them they should act like heinous pigs
It’s so bad there’s even a movie about it 🙃😑.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1971352/ Compliance
normal Friday service at a fast food restaurant becomes interrupted by a police officer who claims an employee stole from a customer, but something more sinister is going on.