"When you come right down to it, the fallacy of Giuliani's second term," says a former member of the administration, "is that he's still riding the one singular success he's had in office -- crime reduction. He's got this reputation as a great manager, but what else has gotten managed better? Reading scores are no better than they were under Dinkins, children's services are no better, either, and they threw people off welfare without creating jobs and then claimed they reformed the welfare system. So of the areas the mayor has always claimed he wanted to focus on -- crime, education, kids, and welfare -- what besides the Police Department has been managed better?"

And with his mishandling of the Diallo shooting and its aftermath, the mayor has managed to turn his most visible asset into his most visible liability.

"The Diallo shooting was a terrible tragedy, an incident that clearly called for some healing," says a former member of the administration. "And the mayor did publicly express his sympathy to the family. He also said it was a time to reserve judgment until all the facts were known. But then, of course, while the smoke is still coming out of the holes in Mr. Diallo's head, he pulls out his charts and his Police Department statistics and says, in the meantime, I'm right."

"With Rudy, everything comes down to who's right and who's wrong," says another insider. "And this always translates, of course, into I'm right and you're wrong."

The current crisis at City Hall can be traced to Howard Safir's decision in January 1997, against the explicit advice of experienced commanders, to triple the size of the Street Crime Unit. The expansion was based on the elite unit's success: If 138 cops were producing remarkable results, imagine what 380 could do. So, in an effort to continue driving the crime stats down, Safir put 242 untrained, inexperienced, and poorly supervised guys into plainclothes and gave them one week of plainclothes training and one day of video about confronting people in cars and on the streets. Then he stuck them all together instead of pairing them with more experienced partners, because the math simply didn't work. When you add 242 to a unit of 138, there aren't enough veterans to go around. (The four cops involved in the Diallo shooting all joined the unit in this expansion.)

"Then they quadrupled the number of people they stopped and frisked on the street; that they admit to," says a one-time administration insider. "Because, as anyone who's ever worked the street knows, cops don't bother to fill out 250s on most stops. And they confiscated the same number of weapons as when they were stopping one quarter as many people. It's just been a fucking disaster."

Though Giuliani's refusal to rush to judgment on the actions of the four cops indicted for shooting Amadou Diallo was certainly to be expected, the cold arrogance on view was mind-boggling. Giuliani talks about one city, one standard, yet until the Diallo shooting, he refused even to meet with Manhattan borough president Virginia Fields or state comptroller Carl McCall, the highest elected black officials in New York.

And Commissioner Safir's announcement, within nine days of the shooting, that New York City police officers would be given hollow-point bullets displayed a disregard for people's feelings and a case of political tone-deafness that left even some of Giuliani's staunchest supporters dumbfounded. Even if hollow-point bullets make sense, and even if the announcement had been previously scheduled, didn't anyone think it might be a good idea to postpone it?

It took a personal revelation two weeks ago by deputy mayor Rudy Washington (the only high-ranking black in the administration) that he has been stopped and hassled by the police because he's a black man for the mayor to even come close to publicly admitting that this is a widespread problem. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Washington is viewed among black leaders as a nice man who, as one of them says, "has no ties to black leadership and absolutely no credibility in the community because no one believes he has any real influence with the mayor.")