A 37-year-old man was arrested Friday, Nov. 16 after resisting officers after he walked out with a new pair of shoes from Lorin Shoe Store without paying on the Third Street Promenade.
At 4:26 p.m. officers of the Santa Monica Police Department who were patrolling in the 1300 block of the Promenade encountered an employee of the shoe store who ran up to them and told them a man who had just stolen a pair of shoes from the store and had just returned.
The officers went to the store and saw the suspect talking to another employee.
The suspect was standing next to the cash register and appeared very agitated.
The officers decided it was best to remove this man from the store and diffuse the situation, but the suspect had other ideas and refused to exit the store.
The officers decided that this man needed assistance in exiting the store, but when they began to give this assistance, the man grabbed the arm of one of the officers.
The officers checked this move by grabbing the suspect’s arm and continued to assist him in exiting the store, but this man suddenly pulled away and began to run towards the rear of the store.
The officers decided to check mate this player and took him down to the ground.
This man refused to accept that the game was over for him and tensed his muscles in the vain hope of escaping in some impossible way.
The officers reinforced their dominance and the man was handcuffed.
The officers investigated and discovered this man had entered the store, tried on a pair of shoes, and walked out with the new shoes still on his feet, but failed to make any attempt to pay for them.
The employees had run after this man and asked that he return to the store and pay for the shoes.
This man told them that he did not have any money and it was then that the officers had been flagged down and had arrived in the middle of the ensuing verbal argument.
The store was not desirous of a prosecution for the theft of the shoes but the officers decided that due to this homeless man’s behavior he needed to be arrested any way so they did just that and he was charged with resisting officers.
His bail was set at $10,000.
Editor’s Note: These reports are part of a regular police coverage series entitled “Alert Police Blotter” (APB), which injects some minor editorial into certain police activities in Santa Monica. Not all of the Mirror’s coverage of incidents involving police are portrayed in this manner. More serious crimes and police-related activities are regularly reported without editorial in the pages of the Santa Monica Mirror and its website, smmirror.com.
