For Robert Washington, the chain-link fence outside his East Baltimore apartment is a permanent marker of his struggle with a city police officer.

"See this dent?" says Washington, 22, pointing to a depression in the fence. "This dent is me." His injuries required hospital treatment and still bother him, he says.

The incident last May in the 500 block of McElderry St. raises a key question about police-community relations in a city plagued by crime and drugs: Where is the line between aggressive law-enforcement and excessive force?

Washington, who is black, claims he was the victim of an unprovoked attack by Officer Nicholas J. Tomlin, 23, who is white. But Tomlin says Washington started the fight, resisted arrest and had to be pinned against the metal fence and punched into submission.

The Evening Sun has pieced together the incident from police and court records, in which Tomlin, 6-foot-7 and 300 pounds, says he used only enough force to subdue Washington, who is 5-foot-7.

Washington says he was hit with a flashlight at the outset of the struggle and then was punched repeatedly. But the officer says the only blows he struck were with his hand, near the end of the fight when he was holding Washington against the fence.

"I slid my hand up his chest to his face, and struck him with my right fist," says Tomlin. "The face was the target of opportunity to stop the defendant."

"I didn't strike him anywhere else. I wasn't fighting him for the sake of fighting him. I wanted to get him locked up."

"As a police officer, you can't afford to lose a fistfight," says Tomlin. "There's a little bit more at stake because I'm wearing a sidearm when I'm out there.

"It doesn't take much [for a suspect] to figure out how to remove a weapon from a holster. If that weapon is removed, [the officer has] an 80 percent chance of being shot with it."

On that Saturday evening, Washington and nine teen-age members of a softball team he coached were talking on the sidewalk 50 feet from his apartment building.

At 8:25 p.m., Tomlin and his patrol partner drove up to check out the group because in the past there had been attempted burglaries at stores across the street.

Tomlin saw nothing suspicious but told the young people to move along, saying they were loitering and blocking the sidewalk. To the officer, Washington seemed defiant and eager for trouble, so Tomlin confronted him.

Washington denies doing anything provocative that night. Following the incident, he asked for a jury trial and was acquitted of all the charges against him: assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest and failure to obey a lawful request.

Then Washington fought back through legal channels:

* He filed a complaint accusing Tomlin of using excessive force, an allegation recently upheld by the police Internal Investigation Division.

* He brought a civil suit this month against Tomlin, the city and the police department for a total of $11.85 million.

Washington says the officer made racial remarks, hit him with the flashlight or some other hard object, got him in a choke hold, punched him, slammed him against the fence and punched him some more.

Tomlin denies making any such remarks and says he used no more force than necessary.

Moreover, Tomlin insists that Washington triggered the fight by stepping to within an inch of him and defying the officer's order to move.

"When [Washington] told me that he wasn't going anywhere, I put my hands on him," says Tomlin. The officer contends that Washington then landed the first punch, striking him in the groin.

Officer Rudolph Grue, Tomlin's partner, saw no such punch from where he was standing at curbside. Grue did see Washington's arm hit Tomlin's arm when Washington attempted to pull out of the officer's grasp.

Tomlin says that he then ran Washington toward the metal fence in an effort to subdue him, but that the smaller man kept struggling and rammed his right arm into Tomlin's biceps.

The officer says the arrest had become a "violent struggle" at that point, requiring him to punch Washington. As the two men grappled against the fence, the officer moved his right fist close to Washington's face and struck at this "target of opportunity."

"I felt the situation had to be controlled immediately to avoid any other injuries," says Tomlin.

The patrolman says he was not carrying his flashlight that night because the bulb had burned out, and during the confrontation his nightstick remained wedged in the front seat of the police car. He did have a blackjack in his back pocket but says he did not take it out.

"I don't feel comfortable hitting another person with a stick, no matter what they teach in the [police] academy, unless it's a dire situation," says Tomlin. "I've seen the damage a blackjack can do. It would split him wide open."

Tomlin says he did use his blackjack during a previous arrest, "causing stitches."

Aggressive police work does not endear an officer to the community he patrols, says Tomlin. "You're not always a neighborhood hero when you have to place somebody under arrest."

But Washington's account, as well as those of several witnesses, depicts the incident as an unprovoked attack on a citizen whose only mistake may have been to mumble something, while trying to leave the sidewalk, that the officer misunderstood.

That's when Tomlin approached him and struck him in the face with a hard object, says Washington.

"I had turned to go with my team when I heard these keys jingling, like somebody was running after me," says Washington. "Then I felt something hit me in the face.

"[Tomlin] hit me in the eye with his flashlight."

Witnesses said only that the officer pulled a black object from his back pocket and hit Washington with it.

"My right eye was swollen shut," says Washington. "I put my xTC hands up to cover my face and he said, 'Oh, you want to fight, nigger?' Then he uppercut me with the flashlight, busted my lip and bloodied my mouth."

Washington says the officer then grabbed him in a headlock, pounding Washington's jaw with a fist.

Tomlin released him, but not for long, says Washington. The officer "walked toward the curb and looked around. Then he turned back toward me, got a running start, picked me up like a football tackling dummy and ran me into [the] metal fence."

Washington says the impact drove him into the air and thrust his body so far over the four-foot fence that his right hand brushed against the grass on the other side.

Pinned against the fence, Washington complained about his ribs, afraid that they were broken. He says Tomlin then began pounding his body with his fists.

The officer told him to stop moving, "but every time I stopped moving, he would do something to make me move," says Washington.

"I never tried to run."

Tomlin then got him in a choke hold again, says Washington, who called to Lenard Lee, 15, an infielder on the softball team, to "go get my mother."

According to witnesses, the officer replied, "Yeah, go get your mother, that's what you're going to need."

Washington's mother, Patricia Tolliver, was eating dinner when the youngster burst into her second-floor apartment yelling, "Miss Pat! They beatin' him up!"

"Who?" asked Tolliver.

"Bobby!"

"Who?" she asked again, rising from the table.

"The police!"

Tolliver and Washington's 19-year-old half sister, Danette Taylor, rushed outside to find the officer holding Washington against the fence and reaching for a set of handcuffs. Tolliver saw her son's swollen eye and heard him saying, "Ma! Ma!" At least one of the youths saw blood flowing from Washington's mouth.

Tolliver says she approached the patrolman and screamed, "Oh, my God, why are you doing that to my son?"

"Because he wanted to fight," Tolliver says she was told by Tomlin.

Officer Grue radioed for assistance and stood several paces away during much of the struggle, according to witnesses. Washington says that Grue never touched him.

While walking Washington, now handcuffed, to the police car, Tomlin did a curious thing, says Danette Taylor: "He took blood off Bobby's mouth and wiped it on his shirt to make it look like my brother was fighting him."

At the car, Washington says, he was thrust onto the trunk and searched. He says Tomlin then lifted him off the vehicle, saying, "Boy, get your face off the car, I don't want any blood on it."

Washington was then placed in a police cage car and driven by another officer to Church Hospital, where his swollen right eye was examined and bandaged. He also had bruised ribs and a lacerated lip. The next stop was the Southeastern District police station.

Two hours after he had been talking sports with his ball team outside his home, Washington found himself being photographed, fingerprinted and booked by police on the three criminal charges.

His mug shot shows Washington with a large white patch taped over his right eye.

At Washington's trial last summer, Tomlin steadfastly denied making any racial remarks during the struggle on McElderry Street.

"You'll get fired for that in a heartbeat," the patrolman said. "Nobody wants to be a racial scapegoat for this department's internal problems."

And Tomlin insisted that he had to defend himself. "I wasn't going to be assaulted anymore," he said. "It's upsetting to be punched on.

"I don't get paid to get punched."

TOMORROW: One trial ends, another begins.