Illinois Cops Filmed Shoveling Dozens of Spilled Donuts in Viral Video: 'It Could Have Been a Trap'

It's not every day you see police officers shoveling dozens of donuts that have been left in the middle of a road.

So when Matt Topic came across exactly that as he was driving in Wheaton, Illinois, on Sunday, he captured the moment on camera for posterity.

"A thing I saw yesterday in Wheaton," Topic, a media attorney, wrote on Twitter alongside the clip, which showed officers clearing the road of donuts that had been blocking the road.

The officers are seen shoveling the donuts into two metal buckets before stamping down on them to make room for more.

"Stamping them down in the cans doesn't seem like it was going to be sufficient to deal with all of the donuts," Topic wrote in another tweet. "I didn't stick around to see how they dealt with that though."

After filing a Freedom of Information Act request to find out what had happened, Topic shared that police had been called to Naperville Road at around 10.30 a.m. because there were "tons of donuts in the middle of the road." The situation was "resolved" by 11 a.m.

It wasn't clear how the donuts got there, but Topic said he believed they might have been dumped on purpose.

"My theory is that a garbage bag of day-olds (50-60 it appears, which I suppose is on the lower end of "tons") ended up in the intersection, possibly deliberately," he added on Twitter.

"BTW, kudos to Wheaton PD for responding to my #FOIA in less than an hour!!!"

Twitter users saw the humor of the moment, with one joking: "This must have been like a death in the family to them." Another joked: "Cops were earning their 'dough.'"

The Wheaton Police Department's deputy chief P.J. Youker also saw the funny side of the incident. "The humor's not lost on us, either," he told the Chicago Tribune.

He conceded that although officers do love donuts, they draw the line at "one that's been run over 100 times on Naperville Road."

Youker told the newspaper that police received the call about the hazard at around 10 a.m. on Sunday, joking that the incident "could have been a trap."

He said officers temporarily blocked off a lane off traffic near Naperville Road to collect up the donuts.

Youker added that his department is not sure how the donuts ended up on the road yet. But he told the Tribune that he guessed they may have fallen from a delivery vehicle or have been top on top of someone's car before they drove off.

Topic and the Wheaton Police Department have been contacted for additional comment.