Protest Too Much: At Al Sharpton's anti-cop show.

Outside New York Police Department headquarters in Manhattan, as angry chants over a bullhorn fill the air and hundreds of demonstrators wave placards denouncing "killer cops," a woman is politely asking an officer how she can get arrested. The cop, part of a phalanx of police at least notionally guarding the building, drops his bored straight-ahead look long enough to reply, "You have to see the Rev. Sharpton. He's back there. He has a list."

The hottest protest in America-the demonstration against the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx-is as exclusive as the scene outside any downtown nightclub, except there are blue sawhorse police barriers instead of velvet ropelines and the maestro isn't a stylish hipster but the doughy Al Sharpton. Occasionally an Irish cop can be seen at his side, just making sure everything is going as planned. No police dogs or firehoses here. Only a daily, well- choreographed charade: You pretend to commit an act of civil disobedience in the service of high principle, we pretend to arrest you.

Wednesday, March 24, was Rabbi Day. To prove the broad-based nature of his demonstration, Sharpton was allowing Jews to get arrested. "This is not a publicity stunt," Sharpton assured a crush of reporters and cameramen, all pushing and craning so as not to miss any of the day's stunt. Amid all the kente cloth and African-inspired black, red, and green flags, the prospective arrestees stand out in their white yarmulkes and T-shirts proclaiming "Jews for Racial and Economic Justice." This is David Dinkins's "gorgeous mosaic," pale division.

A dreadlocked crowd monitor yells instructions "for those who are getting arrested," and soon enough the Jewish contingent is being escorted through the police in groups of 15 to 20, a bunch of white-haired ladies getting through last. (When a straggler is cut off and blocked from the arrest area, Sharpton tries to explain to the officers: "She's with the Jews.") "I never thought this day would come!" enthuses one protester, marveling at Jews in league with Sharpton. Which is amazing, considering that a Sharpton-supported picket inspired an arson that killed a Jewish merchant in Harlem a few years ago, and Sharpton happily lends aid and comfort to the anti-Semite Khalid Muhammad.

Once through the police, the lucky protesters block the main entrance to the headquarters. They chant, or talk among themselves, or even make cell-phone calls, and at one point break into a halfhearted rendition of the obligatory "We Shall Overcome," dampened no doubt by uncertainty about what exactly is being overcome. After about ten minutes, the demonstrators have to move again through police barriers to another entrance that they also must block to qualify for charges of disorderly conduct.

Why this should be so isn't entirely clear. In fact, one cop, asked what crime the protesters are technically being arrested for, shrugs and shakes his head: He doesn't know. The walk to the second entrance means arrest is near, so celebration ensues. The prospective arrestees pump their fists, give thumbs-up signs, or, in the case of one older lady, do an end-zone dance. Wouldn't Rosa Parks be proud?

The Diallo demonstration is about a number of things: the fetish for the "march" on the left, in the service of any cause whatsoever; the demonstrators' hunger for press attention; the ambition of Sharpton, who hopes to become "the mayor of black New York"; and, finally and chiefly, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose career protest organizers hope to cripple and whose successful policing policies they hope to discredit forever. That's why the protests, cynical and laughable though they may be, ultimately could have a deadly effect.

Action Jackson

The silly qualities are at the fore the day Jesse Jackson arrives. He shows up, impressively, with a mob of reporters and cameramen all his own. A line of them walks backwards, trying to get shots of Jackson as he walks arm in arm with Sharpton. Another line of reporters and cameramen awaits their arrival at the top of some steps, and the two groups seem bound for a great collision, like the clashing armies at Agincourt. Jackson's group pushes up the steps, and people are jostling in a confused, writhing scrum of elbows and shoulders and worried looks. Finally, there's the slightest whiff of what must have pervaded the famous protests of the '60s that Jackson and Sharpton so envy: danger. Only now, the risk is that a reporter might fall down the steps.

After much stumbling and squeezing, Jackson reaches his first destination: the press area, where he gives an impromptu press conference. Which is perfect: a frenzied push through the press, to get to more press. When Jackson's group goes to get arrested, they all briefly sit down, looks of delight playing on their faces. Not just a demonstration, but a sit-in! But no one wants to get arrested sitting down-which would require dragging and other unpleasantness-so they stand right back up again. There's a brief moment of drama when it seems the well- coiffed Jackson, looking like he just came from the CNN makeup room, has trouble getting back up. But soon he's standing and smiling and taking the business cards of fellow arrestees.

Jackson, along with the likes of Susan Sarandon, is part of the protesting elect. The hundreds of hoi polloi walk in a circle behind police barriers chanting "No Justice, No Peace" and holding signs urging the arrest of the mayor. For these protesters, the demonstration is all about peace, love, and hating Rudy Giuliani. A daily fixture is Robert Lederman, a street artist who has been arrested some 30 times for selling his art without a permit. His specialty is drawings of Giuliani as Hitler, which protesters hold aloft. As Lederman, who like the protest organizers isn't shy around the press (he hands out a xeroxed copy of a story about himself), says, "I hope it can become about removing Giuliani from office."

Sharpton, no doubt, shares that hope. He's the protest's epicenter, surrounded always by reporters and lackeys. Behind his perpetual blank look-as if he can't be bothered to be interested in anything-must be a hard-to-repress feeling of giddy delight: So many reporters, so little time! He always dresses to the nines, three-piece suits topped off with splashy neckties. One day he's sporting a black protest ribbon, the next a purple one, and the day after that-surprise!- none at all. He walks with as much of a strut as his stubby legs allow, the demagogue as popinjay. One day when it starts to sprinkle, he breaks out an umbrella as big as his ego, so enormous it could cover five or six people; but Sharpton has it all to himself.

Sharpton says he doesn't care about meeting with the mayor, who is sitting down with other critics but not with him. "I don't need company. I need justice!" he shouts into a bullhorn during one pep talk. But he must relish the prospect of a meeting; it would confirm him as New York's go-to guy of black discontent. A former detective named Graham Weatherspoon, with a left-wing group called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, gives the game away in a TV interview. Tall and dignified, with glistening skin and sunken cheeks that give him an apocalyptic look, like a black John Brown, Weatherspoon nearly shouts: "Rudy Giuliani, you're a dead man walking politically. . . . Mayor Giuliani is going to have to sit down with Al Sharpton, he's going to have to acquiesce to Al Sharpton. . . . You are no longer in control of the city."

With Giuliani's poll numbers plummeting, it doesn't seem such an idle rant. Giuliani's problem is that Sharpton has latched on to an easy sell: The Diallo shooting was a disgrace. One of the more affecting chants of the protesters is a simple count to 41, the number of shots the arresting officers fired. But the incident has become a bludgeon to beat back police aggressiveness generally, to reverse the policing that has helped reduce murders in New York City from 2,200 in 1992 to 600 last year. Since Giuliani's policies-including street sweeps to take guns from those carrying them illegally-disproportionally ensnare blacks, they are presumed racist by the logic of "disparate impact." But what if most crime happens in black neighborhoods? This is the obvious fact Giuliani's foes are too embarrassed to confront. Indeed, the unspoken premise of his liberal critics seems to be that guns are an intolerable scourge, unless they are being carried by young black men.

Fighting the "Pigs"

The gambit of Giuliani's attackers is to posit a moral equivalence between criminal thugs and the police, which is simply the return of an old smear: That the police are "pigs." "A criminal is a criminal is a criminal," Sharpton yells into his bullhorn. Even former Democratic congressman Floyd Flake, a moderate and Giuliani ally who nonetheless got arrested in the protests, says, "People thought that they were getting rid of gangs and marauders, not exchanging them for new gangs of rogue cops whose salaries they pay." Robert Lederman, the artist with the Hitler fixation, maintains, "I would much rather deal with muggers than with armed police." Yeah, right.

Policing New York surely is a messy business. Outside the protest one day stood a 22-year-old black kid named Anthony, at headquarters to try to get back his bike confiscated by the police. He complains of getting rousted regularly by the cops, based on his appearance: a scraggly beard, an earring, a tough-looking leather jacket, a beeper on a chain, and jeans baggy enough for two. He earnestly explains he's never been in trouble with the law, but soon talks of getting arrested in connection with an incident during which he was stabbed ("a misunderstanding"), in connection with a murder at a party (he says the charges against him were eventually dropped), and the latest arrest (for alleged possession of drugs), in which he lost his bike.

Shouldn't the police be wary of Anthony? If they shouldn't be stopping him, whom should they be stopping? Certainly his neighbors at 111th and Lenox Avenue in Harlem who Anthony says are out dealing drugs on the corner every day, and certainly his acquaintances who murder people at parties. But if Sharpton & Co. get their way, more thugs will go undetected. Arrests by the Street Crimes Unit, the outfit that shot Diallo, are down by some 60 percent over the last seven weeks. That inevitably will translate into more guns in the wrong hands, more mayhem in Anthony's neighborhood, and ultimately more people dead. But with the crucial distinction that Sharpton won't be showing up to protest.

At One Police Plaza, there is an area set aside for counter-demonstrators. On the day Jackson arrived there was just one counter-demonstrator: a 73-year-old retiree from the Bronx named Freddy Schuman. Freddy is a fixture at New York Yankee games, where he roams the stands with a brightly colored sign urging the Yanks to victory and a frying pan he lets kids bang with a spoon. One of his eyes is closed, he's missing teeth, and he wears a ratty Yankees cap and jacket. Today, Freddy sports a sign proclaiming, "Freddy sez cops save lives. They don't go to purposely harm." It's a sentiment so commonsensical as to be utterly unremarkable, but it is exactly the thinking that helped rehabilitate the cops in New York and produce the ensuing drop in crime that now makes complacency so easy. Nobody pays Freddy any mind. No one even bothers to arrest him.