U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS REPORT IS SAID TO CRITICIZE NEW YORK POLICING

NEW YORK -- The staff of the federal civil rights commission that
held hearings into New York City's policing practices plans to offer
a draft report of its findings that is sharply critical of the Police
Department, according to two people familiar with the report.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission began studying the city's policing
practices last year, after the police shooting of Amadou Diallo and
the torture of Abner Louima. It has been trying to determine whether
the aggressive policing that has been credited with producing the
city's steep drop in crime has also taken a toll on the civil rights
of minority New Yorkers.

The final report will not be binding, but its recommendations will be
passed on to the president, Congress and other federal agencies.

City officials associated with the administration of Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani said on Tuesday night that they had not seen the draft, but
they accused commission members of leaking some details of it to give
Democrats a political advantage.

The commission, whose members are appointed by Congress and the
president, has five Democrats, one Republican and two
independents.

The city officials also questioned the validity of the report because,
they said, the commission had not approached the city with any
follow-up questions since holding a public hearing in New York in May,
in which dozens of black and Hispanic New Yorkers spoke of routine
harassment by the police.

"You ought to ask them what they did besides hold a hearing a year
ago," said a member of the Giuliani administration, speaking on the
condition of anonymity. "There was no exchange of information. There
was one small phone call from them asking for a piece of information,
and the person who received the request asked that it be submitted in
a letter, and they never wrote. You've got to ask yourself what took
them so long if they didn't do anything."

The Giuliani administration official also said that the report's
findings were likely to be determined more by the political makeup of
the panel's membership than by any research the commission did. Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani has often said that Hillary Rodham Clinton's plans to
run against him for the U.S. Senate have coincided with an increase in
federal investigations of his administration.

The Democratic members of the commission are Cruz Reynoso, a law
professor at the University of California at Los Angeles; Yvonne Y.
Lee, a consultant in San Francisco; Christopher Edley, a Harvard
professor and an adviser to President Clinton on racial issues;
Victoria Wilson, a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf; and Elsie M.
Meeks, a Lakota Sioux Indian and a businesswoman who is the first
native American to serve on the commission.

The Republican member is Carl A. Anderson, the dean of the North
American Campus of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies
on Marriage and Family Law in Washington. The independent members are
Mary Frances Berry, the commission's chairwoman and a professor of
American social thought at the University of Pennsylvania; and Russell
G. Redenbaugh, a partner at a Philadelphia money-management firm,
Cooke & Bieler.

The draft, which had been schedule for a vote on Friday, is not ready,
said an aide to Berry. The aide, who did not want to be named, said
that the commission might discuss the preliminary conclusions of the
report, but would reschedule the formal review and vote.

In the months since the commission began its investigation, three
police shootings of unarmed black men, and the political backlash from
the shootings, have caused relations between the police and minority
residents of the city to deteriorate further.

In particular, Giuliani's harsh characterizations of Patrick M.
Dorismond, an off-duty security guard who was shot dead in a scuffle
with the police last month after a plain clothes officer asked to buy
marijuana from him, have appeared to drive a wedge between the mayor's
police force and city residents.