And now, in a search for quick fixes, the mayor and the police commissioner have put the Street Crime Unit back into uniform, a change that will, according to police experts, severely limit its ability to do the very thing that made it so successful -- get guns off the streets. And in a separate move that seems lifted from a Stanley Kubrick satire, the cops have been issued wallet-size instructional cards on courtesy, reminding them, among other things, that a man is called Mr. and a woman Ms.

By choosing hubris over contrition and unconvincing gestures over real changes, the mayor has actually betrayed the police department he claims to be championing. He let perception become reality. Lost in all of the post-Diallo rhetoric and frenzy is the fact that New York's Police Department has more contact with more people resulting in fewer violent encounters than almost any other department in the country. The mayor tried to make this point, but the debate was dominated by his intransigent, insensitive attitude and the widely held belief that he doesn't care about the concerns or the fears of the city's blacks and Latinos. Why should they believe otherwise?

"Clearly he played it wrong," says the Reverend Al Sharpton, who for the first time has been able to put together a protest coalition that extends beyond his natural base and crosses racial, political, religious, and economic boundaries. "Instead of being conciliatory, he came off like a southern mayor, and that made it much easier to mobilize. I think Giuliani thought all he'd have to do is wait me out. I'd have a rally or two, and that would be it."

This misread of the situation appears to have been based on at least two false assumptions. First, as Sharpton says, the mayor undoubtedly believed that the anger and disappointment fueling the demonstrations would quickly dissipate. He had a precedent to go on here. When Abner Louima was brutalized, Sharpton led thousands of marchers across the Brooklyn Bridge. But the mayor was able to quell the protests quickly, largely by appointing a task force to recommend changes in the Police Department (months later, after he was re-elected, he openly ridiculed its recommendations).

His second faulty assumption, I'm told by people familiar with the situation, is that he believed he had the cooperation of the Diallo family, meaning that they would not reach out to Al Sharpton for succor and advice. Nor would they actively participate in any protest movements. The mayor believed this because immediately after the shooting took place, he talked to Saikou Diallo, Amadou's father, on the phone. And Diallo's father was moved by the mayor's call. However, sources say, Saikou didn't realize, even after talking to the mayor, that his son was shot by police officers.

But by the time the family landed here -- the father lives in Vietnam and the mother in Guinea -- it was clear that the mother was in charge, and she had a very different view of things. In any event, Giuliani spent the first week after the shooting going on the incorrect assumption that he had the family. Once he learned he didn't, he had to scramble. He even went to their hotel, where he waited 45 minutes but never got to see them.

All in all, by the time the Diallo funeral in Africa was over, the mayor was several weeks into the crisis without a strategy. And while Sharpton was skillfully orchestrating the civil disobedience in front of One Police Plaza -- parsing out the celebrity protesters on different days to maintain media coverage -- Giuliani and his people stayed true to character, dismissing the demonstrations as "silly" and politically motivated. And in what seemed to be a not-so-veiled reference to race and class, the mayor made the astonishing remark that the demonstrations were peopled by the "worst elements of society."

"I told the mayor," says one of the few community leaders to have a decent relationship with Giuliani, "that the anger in the black community is legitimate and widespread, and it's cutting across economic lines. It had already been there, but the Diallo shooting crystallized it. I told him it is serious and he needs to understand this. He assured me he did."