Race Matters In New York

Racial politics are on the radar screen of the New York Senate campaign.

On Sunday, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton faulted New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for not reaching out to minorities after last year's slaying of an unarmed West African immigrant.

And Mrs. Clinton offered a plan to bridge the Big Apple's racial divide.

In a speech at Riverside Church in Manhattan, the First Lady said her new initiative would seek "to support partnerships between faith-based institutions and police, to steer troubled youth away from gangs and violence, and to promote mutual respect and understanding."

The speech followed the recent acquittals of four white New York City undercover police officers who fatally shot Amadou Diallo in a hail of 41 bullets in the Bronx last year.

Using nearly identical words uttered two days before by her husband President Clinton, the First Lady said people all over the city "believe that if Amadou had been a young white man in an all-white neighborhood, he would still be alive."

In Sunday's New York Times, Mayor Giuliani said the Clintons were making police brutality and race relations a major issue in the Senate campaign.

"With all deference to the President of the United States, I think he should give more deference to the (Diallo) jury forelady, an African-American," said the Mayor.

Mrs. Clinton and Giuliani, a Republican, are locked in a tight contest to succeed Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who's retiring. Giuliani, a former prosecutor, has overseen the steepest drop in Big Apple crime in a generation.

In her speech, the First Lady said churches, mosques, and synagogues should work with local communities and police to help ease racial tensions. She called for more officers to live in the neighborhoods they serve to better understand those communities. She cited Boston and San Diego as places where crime and racial tensions are down because of good relations between police and citizens.

Mrs. Clinton said she supported new technology that could erase the need for the "stop and frisk" tactics that blacks and Hispanics say unfairly singles them out.

"I propose boosting the Federal investment in technology research, so that we could create gun detectors that could scan city streets and pinpoint guns, reducing the need for stop and frisk."

The First Lady added there were police officers who know they are feared by blacks and Hispanics that "they risk their lives to protect" and want to win the trust of those communities.

"Yet the leadership of this city refuses to reach out, to work with a community that is in pain, to even acknowledge that there is a problem."

The Diallo shooting in February 1999 sparked weeks of protests and allegations of police brutality against blacks and Hispanics by the mostly white New York Police Department. In particular, the Department's "stop and frisk"strategy was criticized. In a study of police records, the New York state attorney general found one stop out of seven did not meet the legal definition of "reasonable suspicion."

Later on Sunday, Mrs. Clinton marched in an early St. Patrick's Day parade that allows a gay group to participate.

The main parade, held on March 17 on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, excludes the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization on the grounds that the event is run by a Catholic fraternal group, the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

Marching in a parade in Queens that does allow a gay group, Mrs. Clinton said she still hopes the main parade will be inclusive. But even if it's not, she confirmed she would attend that event as well.

"I'm marching," she said with a firm nod.