Prosecutors have dropped charges against a community leader who was arrested and given a citation for impeding a police investigation.

Chris Taylor, 33, president of the Union Square community association, was arrested Dec. 3 after police said he interfered with an investigation into an alleged sex crime involving a teenage girl, who ran down the street and asked Taylor to call 911.

Critics said the case was a clear incident of overly aggressive policing and misplaced priorities, and Taylor has since sought to mobilize alleged victims of police abuse.

But police and prosecutors said the decision to drop the citation was made after an apparent procedural mix-up.

Margaret T. Burns, a spokeswoman for Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy, said prosecutors dropped the case because police incorrectly wrote a citation for "disturbing the peace" instead of "hindering a police investigation."

She said pulling Taylor from Central Booking before a prosecutor could review the case hampered efforts to guide the case, and that a citation cannot be rewritten.

But police, who were privately grumbling that prosecutors were backing away from a controversial case, said they consulted with an on-call prosecutor and another at the District Court level and believed the case was on solid footing.

"It appears to me that our officers spoke with line-duty prosecutors, and for whatever reason, somewhere along the line, there was a break in communication," said Anthony Guglielmi, the Police Department's chief spokesman.

Taylor said he was asking questions because he did not believe the officer was taking the case seriously, and said he was arrested when he refused the officer's demand that he go into his home. According to police, he told the officer: "I'm the president of the community association and have a right to know," created an environment that upset the young abuse victim and called the officer a slur used against homosexuals while being frisked.

Taylor had helped raise money for the agency's cash-strapped horseback unit days before the arrest but said the citation he was issued instead of spending a night in Central Booking was not special treatment.

"I was asking a simple question: 'What's going to be done?' " Taylor said. "I received [only] a citation not because of who I am but because they knew they had done wrong."