These days you just don’t know if the police are being honest, embellishing or flat out fabricating out of whole cloth. Their account of what happened sounds plausible - crotchety old man gets overly belligerent and has to be subdued, but who knows. Perhaps their is video/audio.
An 80 year old man doesn’t “[have] to be subdued”.
A little bit of empathy, patience, and common sense would have diffused the situation.
They escalated it.