Cleon Hodge was walking toward the Porter Square T station on his way home from work last month, glancing down at a text message conversation a few minutes after 6 p.m., when he banged shoulders with another pedestrian.

“You gotta say ‘Excuse me’ if you’re going to try some cute [stuff] like that,” Hodge, 21, recalled telling the middle-aged man he’d collided with.

But the man was an on-duty plain-clothed police officer, Cambridge Detective Sergeant Thomas Ahern, and soon he was clutching Hodge by the sweatshirt while a small crowd gathered and a woman recorded the encounter.

Each man believed the other had initiated the contact — a fact of life in a crowded city, the type of encounter that typically ends in little more than mutual annoyance. But now Cambridge police are seeking assault and other charges against Hodge and a woman who tried to intervene, and pursuing a lesser charge against a second woman who recorded the incident with her cellphone.


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