A crime of $3 or $5 to someone could be as important as a $100 fraud committed against someone else.
You could be right that McDonald’s corp would have treated her better than the clerk/manager was treating her. But it is still a crime when someone takes your money under false pretenses and when someone is committing a crime against you, one option you have is to call the cops.
You would perhaps think she should have reached over the counter and taken her money? You would perhaps suggest she assault the clerk. She did the right thing. She called the police. The guy was wrong to cite her.
I have no quarrel with her calling the police if she believed a crime had been committed, but they have regular telephone numbers just like everyone else. The 911 system is for emergencies and she should have been cited for misuse of the system. There is a reason that the law provides for such a citation. She had no emergency -- let alone 3 calls worth of emergency. I simply don't understand how anyone can justify this situation as an emergency, or even a "crime" for that matter.
I will say that, as usual, something seems to be missing from this story. Could it be that she swiped a credit card for the transaction, in which case the procedures at Mickey D's may have been to not refund in cash? It is difficult to understand why a manager -- even a complete dumbass manager -- would refuse to give somebody a couple of bucks back if the order couldn't be filled.