The police account of the incident accuses Anderson of struggling with officers Burns and Hallice and resisting arrest. The police also say Anderson injured his eye when he fell off his motorcycle while swerving to avoid hitting a police squad car.

Community dissatisfaction with police intensified with the handling of the black patrolmen's federal court suit. Members of the Coalition to Combat Racism were disturbed when Mayor Sullivan on Aug. 19 denied charges of racial discrimination in police hiring and promotion practices. Sullivan said, "When I was mayor in '68, we gave them [blacks] the opportunity. We provided programs for those minority people, but they never went through with them."

The black patrolmen charged that police officials made an unwarranted reduction in the number of openings for the rank of sergeant and that the reduction was motivated by a desire to keep blacks out of upper-level positions. There has only been one black sergeant in the department's history.

Four of the five patrolmen took civil service tests in April and were among the 73 persons listed as eligible for promotion. The blacks scored 92.38, 90.16, 81 and 89.52 on a 100-point scale. The highest scoring black patrolman, Calvin J. Kantor, ranked twentieth on the civil service eligibility list.

In the suit, the patrolmen argued for promotion under provisions of a state "selective certification" rule that allows civil service positions requiring "special qualities" to be given to persons who may be outranked on a civil service list. Although the rule has been used primarily for women and bilingual persons, the patrolmen said the rule applied to them, since their ability to relate to the Cambridge black community constituted a "special quality" needed by the police force.

The response of some city councilors to the black patrolmen's complaint angered community groups including the local chapter of the NAACP and the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee, as well as many white civic leaders. Council independents Daniel Clinton, Walter Sullivan and Thomas Danehy made public statements last month that led one civic group to charge "racism" in the city council.

Danehy has submitted an order, still under council consideration, that would affirm council opposition to the concept of selective certification, have the city pay for an attorney used by police in the federal suit and censor Councilors David A. Wylie and Saundra Graham for "public actions which tend to defame the Cambridge Police Department."

At a July city council session, Danehy said selective certification smacked of "reverse discrimination." He said there is no justification for promoting black patrolmen "who happen to be so low on the list that to appoint them would throw the departmental table of organization out of line."

Danehy's action led the Cambridge Chronicle to publish an unusually strong editorial criticizing city leaders for making "nothing but platitudes and meaningless blanket statements." The paper also called Danehy's order "wholly unconstructive, thoughtless, and inflammatory" and asserted that the city badly needs more minority group representation.

"Where the fault for this situation lies--in Police Department attitudes, civil service structures, the community's disposition as a whole, or all of these--does not matter in the end," the paper said. "What does matter is that it be remedied promptly."

Danehy said there is no justification for promoting black patrolmen 'who happen to be so low on the list...'