Camera buff Ram Porat didn’t think twice about snapping pictures of an Upper West Side housing complex – until he was surrounded by security guards with post-9/11 jitters who put him under “civilian arrest.”
Now Porat, 43, has filed a lawsuit against the Lincoln Towers complex and the city, saying his rights were violated by the guards who demanded he stop taking pictures and the cops who charged him with trespassing at their request.
“The issue is the right of any member of the public to be in a public area taking photographs . . . without private security guards invoking 9/11 security concerns to infringe on that right,” said Porat’s lawyer, David Milton.
Porat, a private investor, was taking a walk in April of last year, testing out a new digital camera.
But his day of snapping pictures turned bizarre when he reached Lincoln Towers, a co-op complex on West End Avenue between 66th and 70th streets, where he’d lived until 2000.
The buildings surround a courtyard that Upper West Siders use as a short cut to West End Avenue.
Porat was standing on the sidewalk taking pictures, when a Lincoln Towers security guard told him to stop. “He said, ‘You can’t take pictures,’ ” Porat recalled. “But I was standing on West End Avenue. I was shocked.”
Porat crossed the street but kept taking pictures and then walked through the courtyard. There, another guard demanded to see his pictures and his identification, but Porat refused – and the guard told him he was under “civilian arrest.”
More guards came and surrounded him, and then two police officers arrived, ticketing him for trespassing. One cop told him they were acting out of “security concerns after 9/11,” according to the lawsuit, filed last month. The trespassing charge was dropped after Porat challenged it in court.
Lincoln Towers Vice President Jim Heller told The Post the courtyard where Porat was arrested is private property. He said he wasn’t aware of the lawsuit and refused to comment.