Sixteen-year-old Bryon R. Logan was walking with a group of friends in Central Square one night when they were stopped by the police.

The officers questioned Logan and then searched him for drugs, asking him to drop his pants.

Logan, who is Black, says he was just walking home from the 7-Eleven that night.

"I felt violated. I was angry. Why search me?" he says.

To Logan and many other Black teens interviewed in the city, the incident typifies a daily occurrence throughout Cambridge--the harassment of Black youth by the police.

But to the police the incident represents a routine questioning of a person whose behavior they perceived as suspicious, which as crime-preventing as well as law enforcement officers, they are legally allowed to do.

These two different views lie at the center of tensions and conflict between the city's teenagers and the police force.

Last summer public attention focused on the police department after Karimu Rashad, a Black Rindge and Latin graduate, filed a complaint alleging he had been mistreated by a police officer.

Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves '72 publicly supported Rashad, angering many police officers.

The police review board cleared the officer involved earlier this fall. The civilian review board is still considering the case.

Black teenagers interviewed at the city's high school and youth centers say encounters with the Cambridge police, such as Logan's and Rashad's, are common. The city's Black teenagers, especially males, are unnecessarily being singled out for "harassment" by the police for no other reason than the fact that they are Black, they say. The teenagers cite incidents ranging from "being roughed up" by police to being rudely questioned and ordered to leave neighborhood street corners where they are "just hanging out" with friends.

The kinds of encounters with police officers have confirmed many teenagers' longstanding distrust of the police.

"I don't think they have any respect for us. I don't have any respect for them," says Logan, a junior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. "When I see them, I don't think they protect me."

While police admit that some of the teenagers' complaints and stories of harassment by specific officers may be valid, they maintain that, on the whole, their interaction with city teens are conducted on a strictly professional and courteous basis.

"I thinks [teenagers] are being treated with total respect in this city," says Sergeant Richard Lyons, "I think we're being very patient."