It certainly doesn’t seem like a once-off sort of crime; but, on the other hand, I’d be curious about the viability of repeat offences.
The police stealing from the poor-and-presumed-criminal is certainly common, even legal if you do the asset forfeiture paperwork; but bringing a debit card into it means that now some combination of payment card industry fraud detection people and vendor customer-tracking types are involved; and both are likely to be statistically vigilant, have reasonably detailed records; and have their assertions treated comparatively respectfully.
It could be that my impression of their vigilance has only been shaped by their detection heuristics; and there’s basically zero risk that they do anything aside from burning the compromised card and calling it a day; but naively I’d suspect that bringing them in is really raising the stakes vs. stealing in cash or kind.
