Keeping The World Safe For Coffee Drinkers ~ The Cop Shop

That Starbucks where I hang out is a real Cop Shop! Maybe it's because it's right on U.S. 1 on the corner of 135th St. which is a straight shot west to I-95. We get cops from North Miami, which is where the Starbucks is located, and from North Miami Beach which starts about fifty feet to the north. Then there are the Metro-Dade County cops. Even though there are new and closer Starbucks in the other nearby towns we still get cops coming south from Aventura and driving west across the causeways from Sunny Isles Beach, Bal Harbor, Surfside, and Bay Harbor Islands. A few drive north from Miami Shores and the Village of Biscayne Park. It's also a daily occurance to have a few Metro-Dade Fire Rescue vehicles idling as they get their coffee mugs get refilled.

Nobody has ever given me any grief about photographing there, and last year my photo exhibit at that Starbucks featured a lot of photographs that I took there. That's why I was so surprised this evening when a woman wearing a shirt saying something about "Investigations" shouted at me in a nasty tone of voice "Just what do you think you're doing?"as I took a picture in the parking lot of a strange looking trailer hitch ornament. Imagine three miniature 225 horsepower shiny black Mercury outboard motors in a row, with tiny chrome props that really turn, attached to the hitch receiver on the back of a big black SUV. I thought it was cute and kneeled down to shoot a self-portrait of myself admiring those Monkey sized outboards.

That's when she confronted me. I'd never seen her there before, and I told her that it was none of her business. I said that I took pictures there all the time there and that everybody knew me and that taking pictures was what I do. I guess that I was starting to seem a bit confrontational myself as I stood up and told her that she needed to learn the law a bit better. Looking back at it I suppose I should have shot a few frames of her also before she calmed down a bit and walked away.