NEW YORK - Almost two weeks after an undercover detective shot Patrick Dorismond in a botched drug sting - the fourth unarmed black man to be shot by New York police in 13 months - Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is suffering greatly for his failure to form any links to his city's massive black community.
Even in his first term as mayor, Giuliani was never very popular with black New Yorkers. He was a Republican where 90 percent of the city's blacks vote Democrat, and he had defeated David Dinkins, the city's first black mayor.
But early on, Giuliani at least met with them. A small circle of black officials and clergy supported and advised him. He went to town meetings in black neighborhoods, and listened to residents.
When a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was tortured by police officers in a Brooklyn stationhouse, Giuliani rushed to his bedside, met with his family, condemned the torturer, and called for reforms.
The night he won his reelection, 21/2 years ago, he promised to reach out more to minority communities. ''We have to do a better job to include all of you,'' he said. ''If we haven't, I apologize, I'm sorry. It's my personal commitment, we will try endlessly and tirelessly.''
The Rev. Floyd Flake of the Allen AME Church in Queens, a former congressman and one of the most powerful black ministers in New York, remembers that victory speech.
''It filled me with a lot of hope,'' he said. Flake had long been a big Giuliani supporter. When The New York Times asked Giuliani to name some black allies, he cited Flake first.
''But something happened between his first and second term,'' Flake said. ''What happened in his dealings with the black community is, nothing happened. He failed to follow up on his promise.''
Throughout his second term, Giuliani has had almost no contact with the black community, even though African-Americans make up over a quarter of his city's population.
''Giuliani wrote off the black vote long ago,'' said Fred Siegel, professor of urban affairs at the Cooper Union for Art and Science, who is generally a supporter of the mayor.
Blacks are returning this neglect - many term it disrespect - in kind.
A poll last month showed just 8 percent of blacks here have a favorable view of the mayor. Only 4 percent say they will vote for Giuliani in the upcoming US Senate election, while 90 percent plan to vote for his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In the 1997 mayoral election, by contrast, Giuliani attracted 20 percent of the city's black vote, a huge figure for a Republican.
Across the city, politicians, activists, and ordinary citizens - black and white - are wondering where Giuliani went wrong, why he has chosen to ignore such a huge segment of his own city.
There was a moment in his second term when he started paying attention again. A little over a year ago, after a West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo was killed by four policemen as he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building in the Bronx, Giuliani met with some black leaders.
Manhattan borough president C. Virginia Fields and state comptroller Carl McCall had sought meetings with the mayor for over a year, ever since that election-night pledge. Giuliani had always put them off, until Diallo's death.
Flake also met with the mayor, though it was far from the first time. ''I tried to get him to realize,'' Flake recalled, ''that this was not an Al Sharpton thing, that there was a good deal of fear on the part of middle-class African-Americans like myself, who were afraid of their sons being stopped by gangs of police officers more than by street gangs.
''I suggested that he make a statement,'' Flake said, ''to give a sense of comfort that he is the mayor of all the citizens. He nodded. But that didn't happen. He went the other way.''
Flake added, ''That was the last time I talked with the mayor. He hasn't called me since.''
Fields said she met with Giuliani three times just after the Diallo shooting. At the first session, she recalled, ''He acknowledged that he should have met with me prior to that, and said we would meet as needed on a more frequent basis.'' But, she added, ''There has been no follow-up, no more meetings, since then.''
Dennis Walcott, president of the New York Urban League, set up two meetings between Giuliani and some black teenagers. ''There was very good interaction,'' Walcott recalled. But, again, after that, nothing.
Giuliani's press office did not respond to requests last week for an interview on the subject of race.
Even some of his supporters conceded he has a serious problem.
Siegel contends Giuliani has reasons for his withdrawal. ''It's a two-way street,'' he said. ''Giuliani reached out early, and he kept getting hit over the head, so he quit doing it. He's not a politician in the conventional sense. He doesn't `empathize.' He doesn't like taking crap from people - not just black people, any people.''
However, Siegel acknowledged, ''He made a mistake in breaking off relations. A mayor needs to build ties to all groups in a city. Now he doesn't have anybody to reach out to, and that's not just bad politics, it's dangerous.''
At the funeral march for Dorismond on Saturday, a riot briefly broke out, with 23 police officers wounded by bricks and flying glass. A fear is stirring that race relations in this city may get ugly again.
Giuliani's stance on racial issues dates back to the start of his mayoralty in 1993.
New York politics, over the previous two decades, had deteriorated to a point where the loudest, most radical leaders of each ethnic group demanded special treatment and usually got it.
Giuliani ended this culture, calling for a policy of ''one city, one standard,'' and most New Yorkers, including many blacks, welcomed it.
However, many think he took this policy beyond neutrality, into neglect and alienation. Fields noted there are only two high-ranking black officials in the Giuliani administration. While the mayor shrugs this off as resulting from the absence of racial quotas, many blacks see it as meaning ''their community has been left out of the running of the city,'' Fields said.
Giuliani repeatedly cites statistics showing that New York's police are less trigger-happy than those of other large cities, and that they are getting less and less so. Last year, 11 citizens here were killed in 71 police shootings. By comparison, in 1993, 23 were killed in 215 shootings.
However, the outrage over Dorismond's death is over not so much the shooting - which is under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney - as the mayor's reaction to it.
Dorismond was standing on a midtown street corner after midnight when an undercover detective, doing a ''buy-and-bust'' drug-sting operation, approached him for some ''smokes.'' Dorismond - who, as a security guard for the 34th Street Business Improvement District, worked all day clearing the streets of criminals - got angry at the affront. A fight broke out. Back-up officers ran to the scene. One of them shot Dorismond.
The real storm broke when Giuliani released Dorismond's rap-sheet, to show that the victim was, as he put it, ''not an altar boy.'' The material included an alleged offense committed when Dorismond was 13 - a record that the juvenile court had ordered sealed. His adult arrests were for minor infractions, pleaded down to ''disorderly conduct,'' but the mayor falsely said they were for robbery.
When Giuliani came under attack, he justified opening the sealed record, saying a person's right to privacy ends with his death. He also refused to meet with Dorismond's grieving mother, saying that doing so would suggest the police officer was to blame for the shooting.
