NEW YORK SURVIVAL COURSE / MAYOR DEFENDS OFFICERS' TOUGH TACTICS

Learning To Deal With An Enemy: The Police

NEW YORK---"We're here to teach you how to survive," the detective
Terrance Wansley of the New York Police Department tells his audience
at a Bronx community center. "It's dangerous out there. You need to
learn to protect yourselves so you can stay alive."

This doomsday rhetoric may sound out of place in the "new" New York,
where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his army of 40,000 police officers
have won international acclaim for winning the war on crime. But Mr.
Wansley and his colleagues are not teaching how to survive encounters
with gang members or muggers. They are teaching how to survive
encounters with police.

Their message is as chilling as it is simple. The golden rule is:
Comply. No matter how unwarranted the stop, no matter how abusive the
cop, comply.

Do not make sudden moves. Do not reach for your license without asking
permission. And do not dare get wise.

"Sure, you've got rights," Mr. Wansley tells the all-minority crowd.
"But your most important right is your right to go home to your
family. The street is not the place to play Johnnie Cochran. " Mr.
Wansley's group, 106 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, has been
delivering its survival seminars to New Yorkers of color almost every
night since Feb. 4, when an unarmed West African street vendor named
Amadou Diallo died in a fusillade of 41 bullets fired by four white
New York police officers outside his apartnent in the Bronx.

That shooting has become the latest flashpoint in New York's history
of racial conflict, and perhaps the greatest challenge to Mayor
Giulianits new that more aggressive policing has paid dividends for
all New Yorkers.

Six weeks after the barrage of bullets, the case is still making
headlines. The flarnboyant Reverend Al Sharpton still holds daily
protests and sit-ins at police headquarters; on Monday, former Mayor
David Dinkins and U.S. Representatives Charles Rangel and Gregory
Meeks, both New York Democrats, were arrested along with him and
charged with criminal trespass.

THE FOUR OFFICERS have yet to give statements to investigators, but
the mayor has refused to criticize them, and no one has been suspended
from his job.

Federal prosecutors have moved in to oversee the investigation, and
the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board has launched a probe of the
elite street crimes unit to which the officers belonged.

Needless to say, the incident has also prompted a flurry of lawsuits.
Mr. Cochran, the lawyer who became famous in the O.J. Simpson murder
trial has signed on to represent the Diallo family. And Mayor Giuliani
has announced a $10 million recruitment drive to diversify the police
force, which is two-thirds white overall, with a command staff that is
more than 90 percent white.

The bottom line is that even though police shootings are rare here and
crime is still plunging--- police officers in Washington shoot five
times as often as New York's, and its crime rate is double New
York's---there is an unmistakable feeling in many minority
neighborhoods that the police is an enemy force.

The officers of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement do not even try to deny
this. They just explain how to handle the enemy.

"It's very sad, but we've got to deal with reality the way it is,"
said Eric Adams, a police lieutenant who runs 100 Blacks in Law
Enforcement. He says thatevery one of its members has been harassed by
white officers while off duty. "We're sick of brothers and sisters
getting killed and brutalized. We're saying: Here are some practical
tips to avoid that."

The tips include: Always carry LD. Always remain calm. It is proF ably
going to be up to you to defuse the situation, so be polite. If your
car is pulled over, keep your hands in plain view. And never reach
into your pockets; a lawyer for the officerR in the Diallo case has
said they thought he was reaching for a gun.

The seminars touch briefly od the dangers and difficulties of police
work. Mostly, though, the seminar portrays the typical officer as a
loose cannon from Long Island, suspicious of anyone with dark skin,
ready to give beatings for "contempt of cop," looking for excuses to
frisk blacks.

These are generalizations that Mayor Giuliani assails as "anti-police
prejudice," but when Mr. Wansley asked if anyone in the room knew a
victim of police brutality almost every hand was raised.

Sylvia Morales a legal secretary from the Bronx once woke up at 2 A.M.
with an officer's gun to her head. The police had knocked down her
door on a drug raid, but they had the wrong address for their search
warrant. "If I made a move like Diallo, I might be dead, too," she
said. "When you panic in this city, bad things can happen to you."

The mayor resents the irnplication that the police force is a danger
to minorities, and he angrily rejects complaints that his
"zero-tolerance" policies on crime have translated into the harassment
of lawabiding residents of minority neighborhoods.

He acknowledged at a prayer vigil Sunday that the Diallo case was a
"terrible, terrible tragedy," but he said he believed that most people
of color in New York should be delighted with aggressive police tactics.

For starters, he points out, fewer of them are getting
killed.

[Caption to adjoining photos]: After Amadou Diallo, right, was killed
by police bullets, minorities in New York City are being taught that
the golden rule is to comply with officers. Protesting the death of
Mr. Diallo, former Mayor David Dinkins, left; the Reverend Al
Sharpton, center left, Congressman Charles Rangel, center right, and
the Reverend Herbert Daugherty go down on one knee to await their arrest.

[accompanying article]:

9 OF 10 BLACKS, IN POLL, FEAR NEW YORK FORCE

New York Times Service

NEW YORK---Ln the aftermath of the shooting death of a West African
immigrant, Amadou Diallo fewer than a quarter of all New Yorkers
believe that the police treat blacks and whites evenly, with blacks in
particular viewing the police with fear and distrust according to a
New York Times poll.

Neariy 9 out of 10 black residents questioned in the survey said they
thought that the police often engaged in brutality against blacks, and
almost twothirds said that police brutality against members of
minority groups in general was widespread. Also, snore than two-thirds
of blacks said the pollcies of the Guiliani administration have caused
an increase in police brutality.

The survey suggests that police matters and race relations---along
with a growing dislike for the assertive style of Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani---have combined to give him the lowest job-approval rating of
his five-year tenure, 42 percent, reflecting a sudden, precipitous
drop in his popularity. Just five months ago, a New York Times/CBS
News poll found that 63 percent of city residents approved of Mr.
Giuliani's perfonnance.