I’m surprised the cop was that naive, but I guess it’s because he’s a rookie. He’s got a good heart but he was scammed plain and simple. I grew up, still live in NYC (unfortunately) these bums pull these kind of scams all the time, especially on tourists which no doubt is what he was aiming for.
Did it not seem strange to this cop why this dude was sitting in front of a shoe store with his bare feet sticking way out into the sidewalk? And in Times square? Come onnn. And now he’s doing it again. He sees it works, so he will do it again and again and again and sell the shoes to some tourist for $10 bucks which is what he probably did 10 minutes after the cop bought him those shoes.
That whole area in Times square is just one huge cesspool of scammers and thieves. I walked through there last year and did a test, I had an old wallet I was going to throw out, but instead I put it in my back pocket and let it stick out bit and walked from 7th ave and 42nd st heading north. Before I even got two blocks I thought I felt something, so I reached around and guess what? The wallet was gone! *What* a surprise!
Maybe it fell out.
In any case it's not clear that the pickpocket situation in Times Square is worse than it was over 50 years ago: link (2 pages)
New York has millions of people. Some of them are pickpockets. What is the first place any of them are going to think about when they are looking for large crowds of people, some of whom will be naive tourists?
In my defense, that was a really nice wallet.