His right eye is bloodied from being struck recently by another prisoner at the county jail in East Cambridge.

On the morning of August 23, he was on Brookline Street walking toward the Multi Service Center for the Homeless. Two women were walking together in the same direction.

Thomas says that as he walked past them, one of the women asked him, “What are you looking at;” that he replied, “yo’mama,” and that there was more back and forth. After he entered the Multi Service Center, the women followed, complained about his behavior, and were escorted out by a staff person.

The women then walked three blocks west to the police station. According to Sgt Maffei, he was standing out front with Officer Schwartz when the two women approached them.

One of them told a very different story about their encounter with Ken Thomas, involving really gross, aggressive language and behavior. In Sgt Maffei’s report, on her complaint, “he’s sexually harassing me,” there was “probable cause to arrest” Thomas.

The cops reported that Kenneth Thomas vigorously resisted arrest. He doesn’t claim to have been particularly cooperative, but then, he says, no one ever told him he was under arrest. The cops came in and stood up against him on both sides, and said:

“We want to talk with you.”

“What do you want to talk with me about?”

Thomas then felt them pushing him sideways with their their bodies, toward the front door. Then they were grabbing him. At no time did they ask him to “come with them” or say anything about being arrested. Now he was pushed up against the wall at the end of the short entranceway corridor .

Then they were outside. All, Thomas, Maffei, and Schwartz, sort of tumbled to the ground where he was handcuffed, then held up against the outside wall until the police wagon came and took him to Cambridge Hospital, in case he was injured.

Monica Raymond, who lives a few blocks down Brookline Street, came into the Multi Service Center that morning on an errand. She saw Kenneth, whom she knew, sitting at the round table, writing. She came back out and said hi to him. As they were talking, two cops in motorcycle boots and shades strode in.

“In like one second” Raymond saw them grab Thomas under the arms and drag him 8 to 10 feet to the end of the entranceway corridor.

She saw them throw him into the corner where “they started waling at him.” She thought: these individuals must have had trouble with this man before to be acting that way. She heard him ask “in a composed, even voice....Why are you hitting me? Why are you hitting me?”

The acting director of the Center, Len Thomas (no relation of Ken Thomas), came up to Monica and told her, “You can’t stay.”

So she went out, passing the three men, so that she was able to hold open the glass outer door for them. Now they were all outside. As the cops pushed Thomas against the outer wall, he asked calmly, “Why are you touching me? She looked at me. Why am I getting blamed?”

Raymond thought she should go back inside and get Thomas’ belongings. The police hadn’t thought of that, but when they saw her carrying them out, they ordered her to drop them. Len Thomas came out and observed, “The cops really don’t want you here.”

At the hospital, Kenneth Thomas asked the doctor who came in to look at him, to give his name. The doctor ignored him. “Don’t put your hand on me if you won’t tell me your name.” Did Thomas want to see a psychiatrist? Yes, he did— in hopes of getting someone to listen to his story of what had happened to him.

A psychiatrist appeared and identified herself as “Doctor Bird.” Doctor Bird wasn’t interested in talking. She asked him if he were allergic to any drugs. “I’m allergic to all medication,” he said; he didn’t want to take any. She said, “Listen to me. Either you take an oral sedative or I will have security come in and one will be administered.”

He remembers asking her, “Don’t you have any medical integrity?”

“I try to speak clearly, coherently,” he explains, “ so they will perceive me to be level headed ... wealthy, a college student or something.”

Kenneth Thomas was pushed face down in a jitney and felt something punch into his buttocks.

Monica Raymond went to the Middlesex courthouse in East Cambridge and waited for Thomas to be arraigned. Since he was already on probation, and could not make bail, he spent three weeks in the county jail until his probation surrender hearing.

Of six charges brought by the police against Thomas, the only one that the judge found any merit in pursuing was— resisting arrest. The woman who accused him of sexual harassment is nowhere to be found.

I tried to find out whether this sort of thing happened very often at the Multi Service Center for the Homeless. I assumed that it does not.

But Acting Director Len Thomas couldn’t tell me. The Center is an agency of the City of Cambridge. He apologized, but he had to get clearance from his superiors before he could tell me anything beyond his name, rank and serial number.

His superior told him that I had to get a clearance from the City’s Legal Department, in the person of Arthur Goldberg. Goldberg never returned my calls. ***** Sexual harassment is a serious offense. It is also pervasive, almost as though society were conducting a low-intensity terror campaign against women. Like all terror campaigns, it disorients all sides. It feeds on itself. The police are not well-suited to combat it. The police report lists as witnesses only Len Thomas and the companion of the woman who claimed harassment. Nobody ever asked Monica Raymond to be a witness.