It seems surreal to me that you would have the cops called on you for 3 bucks.. what happened to human interaction (for real) ?
> After many more attempts to intimidate me, I was finally informed of the charge: “that smoothie place over there says you the stole cash from their tip jar.” Huh? How much? One of the officers returned from the smoothie bar, and said, a bit sheepishly: “they say it was $4.”
So the most likely scenario was a comedy of errors. All the cops know is that the manager of the smoothie place ran up to them and said "that guy just robbed our tip jar!" They interpret this to mean he emptied out the entire tip jar, which would be a pretty brazen thing to do, so they roll up on him hard out of disgust that anyone would do such a thing. Then they talk to him and discover that what actually happened is that he absent-mindedly took $4. That's a very different class of violation, but it's not like they can take back the aggressiveness of their initial approach. The damage was done.
In theory, the officers could have avoided the mistake by questioning the manager for more details before making the stop. Look at it from their perspective, though -- one of the people you're employed to protect is telling you that he's just been robbed, and if you futz around too long, the perpetrator gets on his plane and gets away with it. It's not surprising they would decide to stop the guy first and work out the details once they could be confident he wasn't going anywhere.
I feel bad for the author, but I feel bad for the officers too, who (by this account, anyway) were put into a pretty awkward position by the actions of the smoothie shop manager.
Also, apparently what he actually did: his story of mistaking the contents for his change don't make any sense unless it was the entire contents.
You mean, when the worker repeatedly told him that the thing he had just taken money from was the tip jar?
The resort to law enforcement happened after direct interaction failed.