About twenty minutes before this photo was taken, I was in the Hollywood/Highland Metro station when I saw several sheriffs standing around and a man sitting against a pillar with his hands handcuffed behind his back. I took out my camera and started to take pictures when I heard someone shout, “Hey! You!” I put down my camera and saw that the sherrif on the right was yelling over at me. “Come here!” I walked over and met him and his bald partner at the turnstile. I asked if there was a problem. “Yeah. You can’t take pictures of a suspect. It violates his civil rights.” A few weeks earlier I was in the passenger seat of my friend’s car when she got pulled over for expired tags. As she was getting her ticket I took a photo of the officer handing her the ticket. His partner then came up to my window and told me it was illegal to take photos of the police. That same day I went to the West Valley police station and asked the desk sergeant what was permissible when it came to public photography of police officers. She told me in no uncertain terms that as long as both my feet were on public property and I wasn’t taking photos where people had a reasonable expectation of privacy (Restroom, Changing room, etc) it was 100% legal to photograph anything I wanted. I started explaining this to the sheriffs, but they began shaking their heads and telling me that it was a gray area when it came to detained suspects. I’ve had people tell me that I should have just accepted it and moved on, but the suspect was clearly not a threat, and there were at least four more sheriffs behind them monitoring the situation. I was insistent that either they were wrong, or the desk sergeant was wrong because they had completely different views on the law. They clearly did not like having their knowledge of the law questioned, but I felt it necessary to challenge them on the issue and continued to repeat what the sergeant had told me. After I stated the “As long as both my feet are on public property”, the officer on the right came back with, “Well this isn’t public property. It belongs to Metro. You need a permit to take photos down here.” I should have responded with “You mean that our tax dollars don’t pay for this ?” However at the time I remember I had heard that a lot of public property was being sold off to private corporations, and didn’t feel I had the proper information to challenge them on this point. Since this incident, I have gone on the Metro website and have read the public photography policy. It states that as long as it is not commercial photography, and I am not taking flash photos into the conductor’s eyes or impeding foot traffic, my photography was 100% legal.

The Autoette was a microcar manufactured from 1948 to 1970 by the Autoette Electric Car Company of Long Beach, California. The two-seat, three-wheeled microcar was electric, powered by specially made batteries by Trojan battery Co. 24-volt Dodge starter 1 1/2 hp.motors. Published on March 20, 2006, Long Beach Press-Telegram (California) WHAT'S UP: BUZZ-BOMBERS OF LONG BEACH GANGWAY! In the late 1960s, there were two possible scenarios we foresaw regarding what we would be driving in the 21st century: rocket space-cars like the Jetsons drove, or autoettes like the old people drove. We would've been filled with despair if we'd been told that when the 21st century started, there'd be nothing like a space-car in General Motors' pipeline, and that the autoette would, long before we reached the age of AARP, be driven from the streets , or more properly, the sidewalks of our town. Autoette was a trade name turned generic term for the little three-wheeled electric carts that once seemingly outnumbered pedestrians on the streets of downtown Long Beach. The vehicles were apparently handed out to the town's more seasoned citizens once they reached the age of driving incompetency, whereupon they would take to the sidewalks on significant numbers and drive up the heels and over the backs of whippersnappers who didn't have the god-given sense to steer clear of a determined errand runner behind the wheels of one of these “buzz-bombs”. And “behind the wheel” is a misnomer. The carts were steered by means of a stick with a handle on it. The things were a snap to drive, and the oldsters helming these little things terrorized the sidewalks of Pine, Long Beach Boulevard, Ocean and other downtown streets for a couple of decades. ….. In 1964 police estimated there were were 3,000 electric cars zipping around Long Beach, but it seemed there were more, … The city was more than accommodating to the fleet of Autoettes, carving cut-outs into the curbs or building sidewalks at street level at intersections so drivers wouldn't have to slow down, … In 1964, pedestrians were given the right-of-way over electric cars. Although the carts, by 1965 had become classified as motor vehicles and therefore illegal to operate on sidewalks, the law was scantily enforced. In 1966 , an 80 year old woman plowed her Autoette into a ladder holding a neon sign installer who fell 14 feet to his death. The law was then enforced.