Chris Lollie was in a public area of the St. Paul skyway when a security guard told police he was in a private area, the city attorney said Wednesday.

A guard said the 28-year-old man was sitting “for some time” in a skyway-level lounge area designated for building employees, a police report said, and officers were responding to that information when they arrived, St. Paul City Attorney Sara Grewing said.

The guard’s report led to the Jan. 31 encounter with police that has drawn national attention and criticism. Whether the downtown area where Lollie was sitting was public or private has been the crux of the case.

Lollie, of St. Paul, posted a cellphone video on YouTube last week that showed officers confronting and tasing him. The video, which Lollie titled “Black man taken to jail for sitting in public area,” has been viewed more than 1 million times.

Lollie was charged with misdemeanor trespassing, disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process. The city attorney’s office dismissed the charges July 31.

“Our job is not to second-guess the decision that officers on the streets make to maintain order and protect the public,” Grewing said. “Our job as prosecutors is to determine whether those elements of a crime are present to prove to a jury, and we just didn’t have that here.”

The case was always clear to defense lawyer Luke Rezac. He felt so strongly that Lollie should not have been charged with trespassing while in a public place that he agreed to represent him for no charge. Rezac said he focused on the trespassing charge because the other charges stemmed from that one.

“Security guards asked my client to leave the area, and he felt he didn’t have to because it was a public area,” Rezac said Wednesday. “When police arrived, it’s obvious he had left the scene. … I don’t understand why police continued to pursue him. They should have left the situation be.”

Police held Lollie’s cellphone as evidence until the case was dismissed.

In an interview, Lollie said he was waiting for a bus to drop off his children when he sat in the First National Bank Building’s skyway-level seating area.

Although a security guard told Lollie to leave, Lollie said he stayed because no signs stated it was a private area.

St. Paul’s skyways are public, similar to a public sidewalk, Grewing said. She said she has seen areas of the skyway marked “employees only,” but that “certainly was not what we had here.”

Nightingale Properties, which manages the bank building, did not return calls requesting comment.

When a guard told Lollie he was calling police, Lollie said he replied, “Go ahead,” because he expected officers would tell the guard he was in a public area. He said he waited about five minutes for police to arrive, then started walking away to see if his children had arrived.

The first officer then approached, Lollie said, and asked him to identify himself. Lollie refused, telling the officer that he knew his rights and that he had done nothing wrong.

Police in Minnesota need “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that someone was involved in criminal activity before they can detain them and demand their identification, Rezac said.

“I would say that the police, from what was in the reports and based upon where Mr. Lollie was sitting, did not have reasonable, articulable suspicion to detain and investigate my client,” he said.

But Grewing said “police were relying on the statement of the security guard of an uncooperative person in an employee area of the skyway, so (the officer) was asking more questions and she can certainly ask those questions.”

When officer Lori Hayne encountered Lollie, he was walking and she couldn’t see the area where the security guard reported he had been, Grewing said. Two other officers, Michael Johnson and Bruce Schmidt, arrived.

The video went dark when Lollie said an officer put his cellphone on a ledge, but the audio continued. Officers can be heard telling Lollie many times to put his hands behind his back.

Police wrote in a report that Lollie was “actively resisting by attempting to pull his arm away” and “began to forcefully try to shove past us as he was pulling away from us.”

When Lollie’s “resistance was becoming uncontrollable,” Schmidt used a Taser on him, the report said. Police arrested Lollie.

Police Chief Thomas Smith said in a statement last week that officers “used the force necessary to safely take him into custody.” The police union has stood up for the officers, saying Lollie “refused numerous lawful orders for an extended period of time. The only person who brought race into this situation was Mr. Lollie.”

Rezac, who is in private practice in Minneapolis, took Lollie’s case pro bono through the Neighborhood Justice Center in St. Paul. Rezac said he told the St. Paul city attorney’s office his client wouldn’t take a plea deal — it was either go to trial or dismiss the charges.

“This was an unfortunate set of circumstances that went too far on a guy who was innocent,” Rezac said.

Before the case was dismissed, Rezac went to examine the area where Lollie had been sitting. He saw no signs calling it private and neither did a Pioneer Press reporter who looked Wednesday. A sign at the building’s lower-level entrance says, “No loitering.”

Rezac told security guards he was going to take pictures in the area. They told him it was a private area and that he could not. A building manager said he would need a court order to do so, he said.

A Pioneer Press photographer taking pictures in the area Wednesday said a security guard stopped him, told him the bank was a private building and said he couldn’t photograph in the skyway.

Rezac said he presented witness statements to the city attorney’s office — one saw Lollie trying to move his encounter with police away from the eyes of children in the area (Lollie has said they were his daughter’s day care classmates) and was doing so “in a respectful manner, not a disorderly manner,” Rezac said. Another person reported regularly seeing people sitting in the same area where Lollie had been, and not being asked to leave.

Civil rights attorney Andrew Irlbeck is now representing Lollie and said he plans to file a federal lawsuit.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman called on Friday for a review of Lollie’s arrest and tasing by police. He and others met with leaders in the African-American community Monday to address concerns about the case.

Emily Gurnon and Ben Garvin contributed to this report. Mara H. Gottfried can be reached at 651-228-5262. Follow her at twitter.com/MaraGottfried.