Yeah... it’s perfectly normal for a squirrel to chase children and move toward humans in an aggressive manner. Yep... perfectly normal. We should all bow before our new squirrel masters.
While you are correct that many will criticize them no matter what. What you fail to realize is there is a very good reason for such criticism. Far too many cops overreact to far too many situations. This is not a case of the chicken or the egg arguments. Cops are being criticized these days because of the never ending supply of stories where they break laws, use excessive force on grandma or 8 year olds... And so on.
Cops are alienating themselves from society, creating more and more people who dislike them, don't trust them and generally avoid them at all costs due to their own making.
No one wakes up one day and just decides to dislike cops, it's always based upon either their eyes being opened to the level of police miscondut that pollutes the ranks of law enforcement today, or it's because they suffered a wrong at the hands of idiot cops.
I have raised 4 squirrels and feel I have some insight to shed on the matter.
First off in the first few days of leaving the nest, baby squirrels have no fear of humans and will approach them even with their parent's disapproval (the female mother is left). So yes it is normal for a baby to approach humans unashamedly. The bite was probable provoked, and was probable just the baby learning to eat from a human host. A baby squirrel will first lick peanut butter from your finger, then will try to see it's success in biting it off your finger. Usually it will quickly learn that if it bites too hard, it receives a thump in the nose from the human. A child may consider that a bite, but rarely do they bite hard enough to garner blood.
My thoughts on what the officer did is this. A squirrel quickly learns a healthy fear of humans within a few days. This officer educated the baby squirrel rather quickly and taught it a life lesson it will not forget in a matter of seconds, and taught it in a non-lethal manner. I have no quarrels with what he did. He could of did the same thing with a quick kick and saved his spray, but I imagine his image would of been even more splattered across the internet had he played that scenario. A damned if you do and damned of you don't situation.
Now having raised squirrels, I am still of the opinion that they are just fuzzy rats. We as humans have no obligation to treat them as otherwise. To call them nasty, destructive, mass producing, disease carrying rodents is fair game, because they are all of the above. They can also be quite fun pets that love to catch your front door open so they can run in and hide a pecan under your rug. There is always that fun all body search they do when you walk in their domain. One of my squirrels would run all over me and stick his head in every pocket I had looking for goodies in 5 seconds flat. The cable man was scared to death of him.