I've seen this video described as "surprising" so many times today that I finally had to say something.
It shouldn't be surprising.
Acts of kindness, acts of charity, acts of compassion - these should be so common as to be unremarkable. The response should be: "Huh. Size 12. That's a pretty big shoe. Glad he found some big enough." And then move on, because, well, the only remarkable thing about a police officer being kind is the size of shoe he provided the shoeless.
What should be surprising is catching people in acts of cruelty, bullying, or brutality - but those are so common that it takes acts of extraordinary cruelty to shock anyone anymore. There was a story on the local news about a man who deliberately ran over and killed a neighbor - no one's shocked by his actions, or surprised that he would do something like that. The mother is saying the man who ran down his friend should be excused because "it would ruin his life to go to prison", and "prison is too harsh a punishment for what he did" and "he has his whole life ahead of him!"
What surprises me is how many people agree with the mother.
And no one seems concerned about the wife who watched her husband being run over and watching him die of his horrible injuries waiting for help to arrive. No one seems concerned that this other man was wrongfully deprived of his life. No one seems to be reaching out to her for her shocking loss - I guess it's just too common to be shocking or surprising to anyone.
Yet let a police officer do something as simple as giving another man a pair of shoes and it goes viral because it's so extraordinary, so uncommon, so surprising.
I'm glad the officer did this, and sad that so many people find it "surprising".