AFTER LOUIMA, NEW YORKERS ARE SPLIT ON POLICE PROGRESS

It was a little after 4 o'clock last Tuesday afternoon, and two teenagers
had just been shot to death at Church Avenue and Raleigh Place in central
Brooklyn. As the police descended, the curious gathered behind yellow
crime-scene tape.

On one side of the street, a police officer apologized to the growing crowd
- -- mostly West Indian immigrants -- for closing off Raleigh Place. "It's a
crime scene," he said. "Just bear with us. It's for everyone's benefit." A
mother and her three children waved to him. He waved back.

Across Church Avenue, another officer told people to move along. "This
street's closed -- you can't cross," he said abruptly. A nurse in
aquamarine scrubs cursed him loudly before reversing course.

Two officers, two sides of the street, two images of the force. That the
police would arrive to protect and investigate was assumed. What they were
being judged on, then, were their interactions with the crowds at the
yellow tape.

"So much depends on how they treat you," said Sandra Martin, 41, a
substance abuse counselor who observed the exchanges.

When Abner Louima, who was tortured by Officer Justin A. Volpe four years
ago, settled his lawsuit against the city and police union, he and the
Police Department agreed that there had been some changes in the way
officers were being trained, monitored and disciplined. And the police
union made clear that it had changed some of its internal policies.

In the city's continuing discussion of police behavior, it represented a
rare consensus: there had been progress.

But if there is a shaky consensus among the players, among the people,
there is anything but. About 65 interviews in the last week with residents
in neighborhoods along the route of the No. 2 subway line, from the north
Bronx to central Brooklyn, provided a mixed picture of where the
relationship stands between the police and the communities they protect and
serve.

Some said that to their surprise, they had seen shifts in attitudes and
behavior: officers trying to be more polite, and stereotype less, at no
cost to public safety. More, though, lamented that despite the outcry of
the last few years, they saw no improvement, and not just in terms of
discourtesy.

Many black and Hispanic men complained that they were still being stopped,
searched and bothered without cause. And some -- mostly, though by no means
all, women and white men -- said they had so little direct contact with the
police they could not draw a firsthand impression.

Few people knew the arcana of police union policy; many did not know that
Mr. Louima had settled his case. Instead, their perceptions have been
shaped largely by experience -- their own encounters with the police. And
perhaps inevitably with a force of 40,000 officers in a city of 8 million,
those encounters vary widely -- certainly from neighborhood to
neighborhood, but also from one officer, or corner, to another.

As crime continues to drop, few people fear that the police will not
perform the duties at the heart of their work. What matters, the interviews
suggest, is the manner in which those duties are performed. The snap,
personal judgments formed during the briefest of encounters can be lasting
and therefore influence the broader debate about the Police Department's
character and conduct.

Ms. Martin, for example, said she had always had good relations with the
officers in her neighborhood but one brief interaction last year had left a
sour taste. She was pregnant and waiting in the passenger seat of a
friend's car in a no-standing zone, she said, when a police officer on a
scooter told her to move the car, then cursed her.

"I was shocked," said Ms. Martin, who is black. "I sat there with my mouth
open."

The New York Times undertook a similar sounding of city voices after both
the shooting of Amadou Diallo by four police officers in the Bronx in 1999
and the acquittal of those officers on criminal charges by an Albany jury
last year.

After the shooting, minority residents felt mostly bitterness and fear;
whites expressed sympathetic bafflement about how the police treated
nonwhites. After the verdict, interviews showed complex and often divergent
feelings: an appreciation of many officers and the stresses they face, but
continuing anger at the abusive behavior of others.

At the moment, police misconduct is out of the headlines. The city is just
turning its focus to the sunset of a mayoral administration whose hallmark
has been its crime-fighting tactics. And so people offered less-heated,
perhaps more-nuanced, opinions about how New Yorkers and their protectors
interact.

Well Served But Ill Treated

The interviews conducted in March 2000 showed a dichotomy: people often
felt well served by the uniformed officers who worked their neighborhoods
but ill treated by aggressive plainclothes units who move throughout the city.

That was the sentiment expressed by Jude Mignon, 33, an owner of the
Chocolate City Barber Shop in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who was among those
interviewed last year.

His feelings now are even more painfully contradictory. On July 13, he
said, with his shop full of people and a customer in the chair, a team of
police officers in helmets burst in with rifles drawn, searching for
illegal guns and drugs.

"They threw everyone on the floor," Mr. Mignon said. "They handcuffed
everybody. Everybody. They had guns out, and their hands were shaking. They
were like, 'Yo, where are the guns?' "

They found none, and after being held in handcuffs for more than half an
hour, Mr. Mignon and his customers were released. No one was arrested.

The police said that the officers were executing a search warrant, signed
by a judge, based on the word of a confidential informant who had proved
reliable in the past.

Mr. Mignon said that if the police had done a fuller investigation, they
would have known he ran an honest barbershop. "The officers in the district
know us," he said. "They patronize us."

The raid left him frightened, angry and concerned for the future of his
shop, a bright, clean space with a new awning outside and paintings of
Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey on the walls. "Why would you try to destroy my
business?" he asked. "Parents who saw that are not going to want to send
their kids here."

Still, he said, the experience did not turn him against all police
officers. "It's a mixed feeling," he said. "I can't hate them all. I deal
with them individually." He praised them for making Franklin Avenue safer.
And he said he valued the friendships he had made with cops who had become
customers. "When somebody's in the chair, you form a relationship with the
client," he said. "You look at the person past the uniform."

On the stretch of White Plains Road where the No. 2 train ends in the
Bronx, one officer in uniform managed to form relationships with all of the
characters on his beat: store owners and gang members, crack users and
cabdrivers.

They call him Bikeman, because he patrols on bicycle. His real name is Paul
Mertens. He is white, policing a mostly black neighborhood. Yet residents
said that he treated them with respect, even if he was trying to lock them up.

Bettye, 57, a self-described crack user who would not give her last name,
praised Bikeman, even though his vigilance was often directed at her
building. "He made other cops look bad to me," she said. "Being so young
and all, he brought attention to how older cops didn't make no arrests."

On the other side of the law, Stanley Wright, 50, a subway conductor on his
way to work, said the neighborhood, which has an active drug market, had
gone to "hell in a handbasket." But Officer Mertens, who works out of the
47th Precinct, really tries, Mr. Wright said. "Bikeman keeps these corners
clean," he said, but when he leaves, they come out."

Mr. Wright was less positive toward other officers, who he said stopped
law-abiding citizens while drug dealers laughed nearby. Others in the
neighborhood agreed.

"The ones they should hassle, they're afraid to hassle," said Nezam Moonah,
22, who manages a 99-cent store. "So they hassle the innocent -- the
hard-working people." Last week, he said, a rookie gave him a ticket
outside the store for having a knife in his pocket. He was using it to open
boxes. Bikeman, he said, would have known that.

Between the aggressive raid and the beloved bike cop lie innumerable
degrees. And some did say they have seen a shift in the axis.

'They're Really Trying'

"With all the things we've seen with police brutality, it seems like
they're really improving — they're really trying," said Rene Moreira, 38,
an art educator who lives on the Upper West Side and who is black. "Their
attitude is no longer, 'You are of this color, so we don't care about you.' "

Donald Washington, 48, a child care worker who lives in Spanish Harlem and
was passing through Central Park last week, put it this way: "There's
really been a turnaround. Somewhere along the line they got to understand
that every person of color does not sell drugs." They say hello now, he said.

George Osorio, 42, a painter who is Hispanic and lives in Brownsville,
Brooklyn, said that he watched intently from his window recently as police
officers responded to a dispute between a husband and wife, both black.

"I wanted to see how the situation would be handled," he said. "And they
handled it real professionally. They were courteous. Before, I used to see
officers act fast, out with the handcuffs in minutes. And I live in
Brownsville, on a dark street. You would have thought the officer would
come out of the car with his hand on his gun. I watched: never once did he
put his hand on the gun."

But to many other black and Hispanic men interviewed, hands on guns are
still a common sight. James Prince, 31, a barber from Jamaica, described
the routine: the flashing light from the unmarked car behind him, the
approach with guns drawn, the citing of a traffic violation that did not
occur. A nice car, a Jamaican accent and Jamaican colors "guarantee a full
interrogation," he said.

"We don't see any sign of changes," he said. "We don't see any effort."
What makes it worse, he said, is that officers never stop by his
barbershop, at the corner of White Plains Road and 222nd Street, to see how
things are.

Caswin Sinclair, 34, a construction business owner who was in the shop,
said many officers still had a "superiority complex." Like a number of
minorities interviewed, he said it had nothing to do with the officer's
race. "Black officers who pull you over can sometimes be worse," he said.

The problem is arrogance, he said. "They do what they want, when they want,
how they want because they know they have the Patrolmen's Benevolent
Association behind them," Mr. Sinclair said. "A police officer has 48 hours
to tell his side of the story — 48 hours to make up his version."

In fact, the city in recent years has, as part of its contract negotiations
with the police unions, all but done away with the provision that allowed
officers accused of misconduct to avoid questioning by superiors for two days.

Mr. Sinclair has noticed one change. "They're not using profanity as much
as they used to," he said.

But if black men at that intersection described the police as too present
in their lives, Yvette Soto, 34, a Hispanic woman doing laundry around the
corner, said they were not present enough. She feels so unsafe in the
neighborhood at night that she had abandoned a part-time job, she said.

"It's like cowboys out here," said Ms. Soto, a caseworker. "I think the
police are afraid to run around here."

In Harlem, the police have no such fear, said Percell Dugger, 40, a
caseworker, who is black. "In the morning or afternoon, they're cool," he
said. "At night, everyone's a suspect." In the last year, he estimated, he
had been stopped 10 times, mostly by uniformed officers. He rattled off
their questions: "Where are you going? Where are you coming from? Who are
you going to see?"

"I live here," said Mr. Dugger, who was buying his morning coffee at the
Starbucks on 125th Street.

A number of people said they had been arrested and spent a night in jail on
minor charges — having an open beer can, for example. Some said officers
used the threat of a night in jail — and a day of missed work — if a
civilian dared to challenge them.

To improve community relations, Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik has
given officers making stops marching orders — to play the radioed
description of a suspect for someone questioned for resembling the
description, for example. Most people stopped recently said officers had
not done that.

Different locations, skin color and personal circumstances still mean
different perspectives. Like several of those interviewed, Reinaldo Garcia,
35, sitting in a South Bronx restaurant, said he felt so estranged from the
police that he would not look to them for help. "A cop is the last person
I'll ask something," he said. "They're so stressed out."

Just blocks away, Tin Nguyen, 59, a South Bronx homeowner who is
Vietnamese, said: "Here, people call the police. That means they trust the
police."

Many whites said they had almost no experience with the force. Aaron Allen,
a 33- year-old computer programmer who lives in Brooklyn Heights, said his
only interaction was running into officers buying bagels on Montague Street.

"They seem like very polite, reasonable guys," he said.

More Abuse Received Than Given

Regina Cafarelli, a singer and dancer who lives on the Upper West Side, has
considerable experience with officers — as friends. She hears their horror
stories and believes they get far more abuse than they give.

"If people talked to cops like this in Colombia or Peru, they'd be lined up
and leveled," she said. And, she said, more cops are disciplined than the
public realizes. "A friend got fired for hitting a guy with a pistol. And
the guy was a drug dealer."

Some whites said they did not know whether the historic drop in crime could
be maintained if the police changed tactics.

"I would not accept any increase in crime with a new mayor," said Jean
Pierre, 31, a bond salesman at J. P. Morgan Securities, who said he had a
"very positive" impression of the police in his Upper East Side neighborhood.

Larry Gaffney, 40, a mover on the Upper West Side, had a less positive
impression: he thought the police had become too militant but wondered
whether any other approach would work. "If you give a New Yorker an inch,
they're going to take a mile," Mr. Gaffney said.

But Derick Nelson, 27, who was washing his clothes at a laundry near
Flatbush Avenue, the end of the No. 2 line, said he thought police officers
could not only improve community relations without an increase in crime but
had a duty to do so.

"I understand it's a tough job, and people in the community also don't show
respect," said Mr. Nelson, an electrician for the transit authority who is
black. "But they are supposed to be professionals, so they have a
responsibility to handle all kinds of people. They weren't drafted. They
took the job."