If that tickles you - you can even be done for theft of things the owner has thrown away.
This would generally apply in the US too given that our jurisdictions only diverged relatively recently.
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Don’t be stupid.
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The country for old men, apparently.
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With that kinda money - the country for young men makes more sense to me.
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Reading the story, it seems that what happened is (bear with me the timeline is not short):
Mr Conkling finds the phone, takes it home.
The next day he’s in his car when the phone starts buzzing or whatever so he looks at the screen and reads a message stating “I lost my iPhone, please return to the Subway”.
He says he immediately set off to do so - and as he drove off noticed police officers sitting in a car outside his house.
He returns it to Subway.
The next day police officers show up to talk to him about the phone.
This of course is where the advice “Never talk to cops” might have come in useful (or might have made things worse, who knows - but the odds are still on not saying anything without a lawyer, kids).
So there’s a bit more nuance to it than a straightforward “I found a phone, took it home, then handed it in and got charged with theft”.
From the owner and the police’s perspective, he found the phone and took it home and he only handed it in after the owner made it clear that they knew someone had the phone and that they wanted it back and after the police tracked him to his home.
I guess these tracking services do come in useful.
Charging him with theft does still seem like the sort of thing only a complete asshole with a quota to fill would do.
The moral of the story would seem to be - given the ubiquity of lost mobile tracking services - either just leave the thing alone, its owner will along soon enough or if you must get involved, hand it in somewhere immediately.
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No good deed goes unpunished. Especially in Overland Park, KS.
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It’s because when you throw things into public rubbish bins, they become the property of the local authority in charge of emptying the bins.
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Sometimes it depends on where it is. In many jurisdictions, if it’s in bags or bins at the curb, it’s free for the taking. You can thank your police for that. They fought hard for the right to do private garbage collection without a warrant.
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“Wasting police time” is a crime in some places. They should apply it to the police themselves.
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Years ago my father found a diamond ring in NYC. He turned it in at the local precinct. When no one claimed it they gave him a call and it was his. (I can’t remember how long he had to wait).
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So what do you say in that situation?
“I found and returned this phone to it’s owner. I don’t feel comfortable saying anything more with out a lawyer present.”?
See I can’t just afford to lawyer up for any interaction. I still think it should be reasonable to assume a simple explanation should end most encounters. But I can see the point that saying anything more than a simple statement could be used against me.
So - what do you do, practically?
The legal system is such a farce. I fucked up a traffic issue that has some possibly serious consequences. Basically I am paying a guy $300 to say “He got this taken cared of, can we change this to a non moving violation and pay a fine?” I could do that. But probably with out the same outcome. 
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On the other hand, the cops don’t want to be in the lost-and-found business and they don’t have much legal mandate to expend public resources returning stuff to owners. Unless there is some crime or public safety issue, in which case they have to “open a file” and treat it as such.
Must be kind of stressful when the sole purpose of law enforcement in a country is to find fault with it’s citizens.
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This assumes that a “sandwich artist” at Subway is more responsible than me in returning a lost item to its owner. Plus, why put the onus of being the community Lost & Found on that kid?
Another tip I learned (but, when I’ve had to deal with it, it wasn’t set up this way):
If you receive a traffic ticket (or other citation), when you show up at the courthouse and they ask if you first want to speak to the prosecutor, politely decline.
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I wasn’t actually asking a question, I do know the answer 
That’s one theory. There’s also a surprising grey area (in some jurisdictions at least) over whether an owner has ‘abandoned’ (in the legal sense) their belongings by putting them in the trash receptacle and if so, when that abandonment takes place.
As @RickMycroft points out some locales have local ordinances that deal with it more clearly
The common law itself is surprisingly harsh and at the same time vague about it.
If we are doing legal quizzes about discarded/lost property - who owns all the golf balls that end up lost in the rough or in the water hazards on golf courses?
Bonus question - who cares? 
Well, that’s one reason why I said lawyering up might just make things worse.
In the UK at least, you would be entitled to a lawyer free of charge if the police want to talk to you.
I think the bottom line (and I am emphatically not a criminal law lawyer) is to remember that in any interaction with the police, you could at any time become the person they consider a suspect.
If you do, you have certain rights which are intended to provide some degree of equality of arms between you and the massive apparatus of the state which they can use against you.
Many police officers (fueled I suspect in large part by internal reinforcement and also the massive help provided by the media as was pointed out in another thread recently) do not like these protections and will frequently attempt to get you to waive them or otherwise not take advantage of them.
They are expressly trained to do this. It is the reason why a lot of their training is focused on asking you things. Even things they are by law entitled to insist on (and things where if they did insist, you would have legal protections which you don’t have if you give them permission).
I suspect all of this is covered in far better ways in the videos linked above but as a practical matter the advice has to be:
a) if in doubt when dealing with the police, lawyer-up; and
b) always be in doubt.
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3 years on, I’m still waiting on our local constabulary to act upon the video evidence (with car tags, etc.) that we provided to them.
Weird. Just a week or so ago I stumbled over an iPhone across from the Austin Convention Center (I live across the street). First thought was, well, this thing can’t possibly work. It did. Second thought, would anyone actually store their own telephone # on their own telephone? Probably not, I reasoned. Not being all that familiar with smart phones but understanding the concept of ‘contacts’, I found that and called up the first one on the list and told them, “Hey! Found this. I’ll be home in a couple of hours. You can pick it up then.” I was sorely tempted to call my sister. Or ride one of those electric scooters that are everywhere here. But, hey, I really did need the exercise and like Frank Burns once said, “It’s nice to be nice to the nice.” Turned out to be a company phone from the Austin Downtown Alliance.
ETA: Also made me want an iPhone, dammit. Even an iPhone 5 like that one.
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It wasn’t until I got to that part that I realized this wasn’t somewhere in NYC:
It can depend on what the garbage is as well.
A local game processing place, I’ve been trying to find a way to obtain wild, white tail deer from. It’s super illegal to sell wild game like that, because the fear is that very rapidly the supply of wild deer would be depleted. But, I guess every year, hunters bring in deer and never show up to pay the $100 processing fee. I asked if there was a way I could pay for someone else’s processing fee, and take home their processed (unclaimed) meat. Nope. They also told me (not that I asked) that dumpster diving for it when they throw it out was also illegal–a felony–and they could get in big trouble as well if someone was doing it.
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