tourist police

A day or two after we arrived in Marrakech we made the acquaintance of Mustapha, a 23 year old Berber nomad guy who hangs out in Marrakech for some reason we can't quite ascertain...we know for sure that he is very very interested in acquiring a Canadian wife (but I think he's a little young for me).
Anyway, we see Mustapha around every few days and are definitely at the buddy stage, stop and say hello and chat a little bit when we see him. Yesterday we were walking down one of the streets off of Jemaa el Fna when who do we see but Mustapha. We stop, chat, start walking in the same direction still chatting...we notice that he is looking around sort of cagily and walking not exactly with us but not exactly not with us...he falls behind and then goes ahead etc. Ooookay...all of a sudden he stops to talk to an older man on a motorcycle...is this a friend? We keep walking thinking he's met a friend but then glance back and notice that Mustapha is now flanked by two police officers...what is going on? Do they think he's been hustling us? We've seen people hauled off by the tourist police before - if it looks like someone is trying to be a faux guide or is hassling tourists the cops will come out of nowhere and take them off. Apparently Moroccans (and this probably mostly applies to men because I rarely if ever see Moroccan women talking to tourists unless they work in a shop or hotel) are not supposed to be hanging out with tourists at all unless they are official guides. If the cops think you're hustling people you can go to jail for 2 days.
So we start freaking out a little...oh god! This guy is going to go to jail for a couple days because we talked to him? What do we do? Is it better for us to leave or go back and talk to the police? We're staring at this whole scene, very concerned, starting to walk toward them, when the guy on the motorcycle approaches us "Is this guy bothering you?"
"NO! He's our friend!"
"How long has he been your friend."
"A week, 10 days...he's not bothering us, he has never bothered us..."
"Okay you go now."
Oooh shit...that doesn't seem to have fixed anything and the cops are still taking Mustapha off into the square between them. This is so messed up!
In a way I appreciate the tourist police because apparently they have made things a lot better but where are they when I'm getting groped by some guy in the crowd? Or when we're attacked by henna girls with syringes? I mean it is definitely possible he's a hustler of some sort (he's always running off on mysterious errands - but for all we know he's just going to talk to friends) but whatever, he's always been cool to us...
There's nothing we can do at this point so we keep going and hope he's all right.
A little while later thank god we run into him in the square again. It's all right he says, they belived us but they took him around the corner and demanded a little baksheesh (bribe) in the form of 50 dirham. He said that when he told them he didn't have any money they let him go. Phew!
That was crazy. We hang out with him at our hotel and drink tea, a friend of his, Hassan, from the desert shows up and is also staying at our hotel so we go out for dinner and then a walk around the square.


Again the guys are very paranoid to be seen with us and sort of take off and come back again...it's all very weird. Damn police!

Tomorrow I am leaving Marrakech to meet Steph in Ouarzazate - we will probably stay there for a couple of days and then go into the desert. We were originally planning to go to Merzouga but apparently they had some deadly rains (!) there over the weekend (there was a spectacular lightning storm here on the weekend) and several people were killed and many homes were lost. So it doesn't seem quite right to go out there right now. We will probably head south to Zagora instead.