As Shooting Protest Mounts, Giuliani’s Popularity Plunges

NEW YORK —  It’s a war of nerves, New York-style--a clash over police conduct that gets uglier by the day--and so far Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani appears to be losing ground.

On the heels of a Feb. 4 slaying in which police officers fired 41 bullets at an unarmed African immigrant, demonstrators have been holding daily protests at the city’s police headquarters, angrily attacking Giuliani leadership on the issue and blasting police treatment of minorities.

The mayor has been firing back, but his comments only seem to arouse his critics even more. And as tensions mount, Giuliani’s press secretary has gone so far as to suggest that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been considering running for a New York Senate seat, possibly against Giuliani, may be behind a recently announced federal inquiry of the police shooting.

“We won’t stop demonstrating until those four officers are in jail,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime Giuliani foe who has led the protests in which prominent New Yorkers, including former Mayor David N. Dinkins, have been arrested for civil disobedience. But in his office across the plaza, Giuliani is openly contemptuous of the noisy demonstrations.

“This is a great publicity stunt; can’t you figure it out?” he told reporters last week. And in a comment to the Daily News editorial board that struck some as insensitive, he suggested that “the biggest beef New Yorkers have with the cops isn’t that they’re brutal--it’s that they’re rude.”

As the rhetoric heats up, the game at One Police Plaza gets more intense: Sharpton baits Giuliani, and the mayor dismisses him as a rabble-rouser; protesters call the mayor insensitive to the shooting, and he calls them divisive.

So far, few details are known about the death of Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old West African who was killed in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building by four white plainclothes officers. Attorneys for the officers said they were investigating a serial rapist in the neighborhood, and that Diallo may have failed to respond to police commands to halt.

Police Commissioner Howard Safir has said his door is open to discuss “constructive changes” in police procedure with “responsible” community leaders. And Giuliani, a Republican, insists the city is doing all it can to assist the Bronx district attorney’s grand jury investigation, but now more players are involved: The state attorney general and U.S. Department of Justice announced last week that they will mount inquiries into the shooting, as well as into the department’s elite Street Crime Unit, whose “stop and frisk” procedures are credited with helping reduce New York crime but have sparked anger in minority communities.

Under those procedures, teams of special officers are sent into high-crime neighborhoods to search for suspects and confiscate guns. Last year, the unit conducted more than 27,000 searches, resulting in slightly more than 4,700 arrests, according to police statistics. The unit has taken hundreds of guns off the street, but critics charge that the officers have unfairly targeted detainees along racial lines.

The Justice Department was already working with Zachary Carter, Brooklyn’s U.S. attorney, to investigate the case of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who says four police officers sodomized him with a toilet plunger while he was in custody at a Brooklyn precinct 18 months ago. The trial of those officers is set to begin next month.

On Thursday, mayoral press secretary Colleen Roche suggested that the timing of these investigations “is very curious”; she wondered why the new federal probe was announced on the very same day that the first lady reportedly began asking state Democratic officials for background on the Diallo case.

“We just hope that all of the Clinton administration officials--and Democratic Atty. Gen. [Eliot] Spitzer--don’t bump into each other as they rush to conduct their investigations,” she added.

Giuliani’s defenders concede that emotion is running high on the Diallo shooting but say there is little evidence of widespread police racism. And the mayor faces a no-win situation because “if he responds to these personal attacks, they’ll criticize him, and if he refuses to comment on the demonstrations, people would say he’s ducking the issue,” said Fred Siegel, an urban policy analyst and history professor at Cooper Union College.

It’s hard to be restrained, Siegel added, when demonstrators hold signs likening Giuliani to Adolf Hitler. They also have disparate goals: Some call for the arrest of the four officers, who have yet to testify before the grand jury; others vow to protest until the officers are indicted. All want to keep the story alive while the wheels of justice grind on slowly.

Giuliani is facing this problem the way he’s tackled other controversies: with tough talk and disdain for his critics. Last week, he unveiled a $10-million program to improve police minority recruiting, as well as an effort to make officers more courteous. But he’s had trouble competing with TV images of Dinkins, his 71-year-old predecessor, quietly being led away in handcuffs. Meanwhile, a group of conservative newspaper columnists, normally in his corner, suggested that Giuliani’s refusal to meet with Sharpton and other critics is backfiring.

In a recent New York Post column, Eric Fettman wrote: “As charming and personable as the mayor can be in private, he has a serious character flaw: He’s defensive to a fault about his performance. You’re either with him 100% or you’re an enemy.”

In fact, Giuliani’s support was slipping even before the arrests began. Many New Yorkers who once were willing to overlook his brusque style may now be having second thoughts. In a recent New York Times poll, Giuliani’s favorable rating plunged from 61% to 42%. And as the controversy builds, some critics are zeroing in on the mayor’s personal leadership style as much as Police Department policy.

“If he [Giuliani] was truly unifying the city, there would be no need for us to be here today,” said Kweisi Mfume, head of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, who came from Washington to be arrested in Thursday’s protest, along with local leaders and gay and lesbian elected officials. On Thursday, 59 people were arrested; 30 more were taken into custody Friday.

Indeed, getting arrested has become a badge of honor for some New Yorkers as the protests grow more heated. About 50 local attorneys are scheduled to be arrested Monday; on Tuesday, it will be labor leaders’ turn. The Rev. Jesse Jackson will “eventually” get arrested, Sharpton said, along with some show business personalities whom he declined to identify.

But the biggest surprise may be former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who has said he is willing to be arrested if he can persuade enough members of the City Council to join him. Koch, who has called Giuliani “a good mayor but a terrible person,” once had Sharpton arrested in his office, in 1978, when the activist refused to leave. He concedes the irony of now being on the same side of a civil disobedience protest with him.

“Look, we disagreed, but I never stopped talking with Sharpton,” Koch said in an interview. “Giuliani has not built enough bridges to minorities, and this is what can happen when you ignore people. It has become a public relations disaster for him.”