An activist is suing the city in federal court after police arrested him for stopping to film their interaction with another man near Astor Place in 2014. Ruben An, who works with the social justice group Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, stopped to record three officers questioning a man on the sidewalk at East Eighth Street and Lafayette Avenue at around 6 p.m. that July.

Surveillance footage from a nearby building shows the man sitting next to a phone booth for a minute, then lying down on the ground. The trio of cops rolls up about five minutes later and rouses the man. Another five minutes pass, and the man is standing and talking to the officers when An walks up.

An's cellphone footage picks up the audio of his exchange with an officer whom the lawsuit identifies as Bekim Becaj (a Daily News story that appears to be about the same officer kissing Jenny McCarthy during the 2012 New Year's celebration in Times Square spells his name "Bikim").

"You're in the proximity of a police investigation," Becaj says, making a shooing motion with his hand. "Step away."

As An moves to the other side of the sidewalk, Becaj says, "You're blocking the sidewalk."

When An stops against the wall of a building, he observes that he is not in fact blocking the sidewalk, which the surveillance footage backs up. Still, Becaj persists with this line of argument, setting the standard for impeding pedestrian traffic at "if anyone has to go around you."

(A federal judge's 2000 decision regarding a tenant vigil that police claimed obstructed the sidewalk rejected the city's arguments and allowed activists to take up just under half the width of the sidewalk.)

After looking away for a period of time, Becaj focuses back on An and, pointing at pedestrians passing, says, "That's three people. I need your identification. I just watched three people divert around you."



The action here is from about 30:00 to 35:00.

Unless officers have probable cause to believe someone has committed a crime, people have the right to refuse to produce identification, and refusing to produce ID alone can't be the basis for an obstructing police work charge. An, aware of this through his police accountability work, refuses to pull out his wallet or put his phone down despite Becaj's increasingly stern commands. Becaj then summons his colleagues to help him arrest An, leaving the original subject of their attention standing alone at curbside.

The lawsuit notes that while Becaj was talking to An, others in the area were standing against the same wall, and some passersby stopped to watch, but Becaj didn't bother to accuse any of them of obstructing pedestrian traffic.

Police charged An with obstructing governmental administration, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest, according to the lawsuit, and An was held in jail for 15 hours. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office took the case to trial nearly a year later in July 2015, and a jury found An not guilty on all counts.

A Manhattan District Attorney's Office spokeswoman declined to comment on why prosecutors decided to go to trial.

An has organized workshops training everyday people on best practices for filming the police. His pending trial caused him to stop recording cops altogether, and since the resolution of his criminal case, he does it less often because "he fears pretextual arrest and prosecution," according to the suit.

Citing several examples of cases like An's, his lawyers write that "The City and the NYPD maintain a widespread practice and custom of permitting NYPD officers to interfere with the rights of individuals who, without interfering with police activity, record or attempt to record such activity in public places."

The arrest violates a decades-old consent decree preserving the right to record cops, according to the suit. In 2014, the NYPD sent a memo to all officers reminding them that it's legal to film cops, and that obstructing people filming is a violation of the First Amendment.

To fix this, the lawsuit wants a judge to affirm that An was in the right the day he was arrested and that the arrest violated his constitutional rights, as well as to issue a permanent injunction further barring the NYPD from interfering with or retaliating against citizen videographers.

"It's not enough to have a rule on paper. It's not enough to have public pronouncements saying that they agree with us," said Bill Silverman of the firm Proskauer Rose, which is suing along with the Legal Aid Society. "What we need is something in practice. We need supervision, we need training, we need monitoring. We need some kind of serious enforcement of this rule."

An declined to talk to reporters on the advice of his lawyers.

The NYPD and the city's Law Department said they would review the lawsuit when it's filed. The NYPD did not respond to a question about whether any disciplinary measures had been taken against the officers who oversaw the false arrest of An. Such repercussions are rare.

In one exceptional case, Officer Jonathan Munoz was arrested in December on charges of filing a false instrument for the police report he wrote up charging a man named Jason Disisto with obstructing police, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest, the same charges as An faced. Disisto had pulled out a phone to record a woman being searched when officers rushed to arrest him.

Prosecutors dropped the charges against Disisto, and the city settled a federal lawsuit for an undisclosed amount of taxpayer money in March. Munoz is still awaiting trial.

Additional reporting by Emily Siegel