How <i>Rudy</i>...

Hillary Rodham Clinton has accused Senate rival Rudolph Giuliani of essentially ignoring the black community of New York City.

Reacting to the New York mayor's statement that he felt no responsibility to reach out to blacks after the city's latest police shooting of an unarmed black man, Clinton said Wednesday: "He's basically written off whole communities in the city that he's supposed to lead. What does that say about how people would be represented by him?"

The mayor's campaign spokesman, Bruce Teitelbaum, responded, "It sounds like Mrs. Clinton is still reading off the same script prepared by Al Sharpton."

The Dorismond shooting came just weeks after four police officers were acquitted in the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo in February 1999.

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's actions and comments following the city's latest fatal police shooting demonstrate a leadership style punctuated by rush to judgment, anger and divisiveness, says Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Giuliani countered that Clinton was the one dividing the city, and he accused her of projecting her feelings onto him.

"There is a process called projection in psychology," Giuliani said. "It means accusing someone of what you're doing. That is precisely what Mrs. Clinton is doing."

The first lady said the mayor's actions after last week's killing of Patrick Dorismond releasing the victim's police record and his girlfriend's complaint that he'd hit her "have aggravated tensions in the city and have helped drive a wedge between the police and the communities they serve."

Statewide polls on the Senate race have routinely shown the Republican mayor getting less than 10 percent of the black vote, while the Democratic first lady gets more than 80 percent.

On Tuesday, the mayor was asked whether he felt any responsibility to talk or meet with black people after the third fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man in 13 months.

"No, I don't think so," he said. "I think this is a situation that clearly had nothing to do with race. The three police officers were Hispanic."

He also defended his decision to release information about the shooting victim, saying, "I'm making sure the public has the facts, and I'm doing it against the media that knee-jerks as quickly and as fast as it can against the police."

NAACP President Kweisi Mfume echoed the tone of Clinton's remarks.

"Rather than trying to demonize Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed Haitian American killed during a police encounter, Giuliani should be reviewing police training standards to see what steps the department can take to avoid the unnecessary use of lethal force," Mfume said in a statement Wednesday from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Clinton spoke to reporters in White Plains after talking about schools with about 250 educators, parents and students at the YWCA. She repeated her calls for nationaeducation standards and for linking teachers' pay with students' performance.