Publicly, however, the mayor and his supporters seemed intent on delegitimizing the voices raised in protest in whatever way they could. With an eye on the Senate race, the mayor and his allies zeroed in on politics rather than on the problem at hand.

"You think that these arrests that go on day after day are just because a terrible thing happened?" says consultant David Garth, architect of the mayor's first successful run. "I think it's very well organized, very smart, and very well choreographed. And there's no way you're going to convince me that Harold Ickes isn't involved here. All of a sudden, the president talks about police brutality in his Saturday radio address? These things don't happen by accident -- not when Hillary Clinton is thinking about the Senate race."

Liberal Party boss Ray Harding, a longtime Giuliani confidant, offers a similar take. "This is a political operation against Rudy, and the core group is made up of the usual cast of characters," he says.

Sharpton dismisses the charge that anyone's using a family's misfortune to play politics as, at the very least, hypocritical. "Who used a tragedy more politically than they did with the Rosenbaum family after Crown Heights? The Rosenbaums campaigned for both Giuliani and D'Amato. Dinkins was called a murderer. I'm not calling anybody any names. And nobody's running for anything now," he bellows.

"Imagine if Dave Dinkins had handled that situation the way Rudy's handled this one. Imagine if he said, 'I'm not going to Crown Heights to meet with the Hasidic leaders; I'll meet with Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger. She's Jewish, too; that's good enough.' Well, that's what Giuliani just did. If Dinkins had done that, he would've been run out of town."

Sharpton may have a point. But the mayor's recent meetings with black elected officials, no matter how overdue and no matter how desperate they seem, are at least a small step in the right direction. The difficulty for Giuliani is that they do little if anything to improve his immediate situation.

"No one takes those meetings seriously," Sharpton says, overstating the case a bit. "Because those aren't the people directing the movement. So fine, he meets with those people, and you still got 200 people a day going to jail. So what did he do? Police brutality will be the top news story all summer, with the Louima trial and the Diallo indictments. This is not going away."

Part of the mayor's problem as he tries to deal with the difficulties of his second term is that he has never been a man in search of advice. He is interested only in reflected light. He doesn't want to be told that he's wrong, that he should do something another way, or that he should consider a different approach. "No one within the administration," says a recently departed staff member, "has ever been able to say no to the mayor -- 'You cannot do that.' "

This situation has become more critical as he moves through his final two and a half years in office with an inner circle that's always been quite small thinned out even further by departures. Though it's a normal part of the political cycle to lose staff at the start of a second term, the mayor has lost some of his closest aides, people he has known the longest and trusted the most: Peter Powers, Randy Mastro, Richard Schwartz, John Dyson, Fran Reiter. (Although most of them continue to speak to the mayor regularly.)

Several people who have been in negotiations with members of the mayor's staff recently have noticed a difference from the first term. "The newer people don't seem to know their principal as well as the original group did," says one. "And that can make things difficult." Another told me they never come to the table with the ability to negotiate. They always have to go back to him before they can make a move.

The City Hall brain drain is particularly important where Giuliani is concerned because he is naturally suspicious and trusts so few people. His administration has always been marked by a kind of siege mentality, an edgy belief that because it's trying to change the city, its enemies are everywhere -- the press, the Democrats, the unions, the race baiters, the Board of Ed. And so, in his search for people he can trust -- he values loyalty above everything else -- he has, over time, relied more and more on Cristyne Lategano.