Not the author but if I were him I would have done the same just because I'm terribly affraid of the police and could imagine it only being worse by not acting

Not the author but if I were him I would have done the same just because I'm terribly affraid of the police and could imagine it only being worse by not acting as normal as possible. While I'm perfectly conscious I shouldn't be like this, really bad past experiences with the police force got me into this kind of mental workflow whenever I see a police uniform. I must say being in the UK for the past years is slowly making me change this perception, I do feel much better just knowing they don't carry guns. And whenever I talked to a PC they were always very friendly and interested in what I had to say (which, as you can imagine by now, is a very different experience from the ones I had in some other countries).