When Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo was shot dead by four New York City police officers last month, many politicians expected the familiar cycle of outrage, a few protests and eventually a panel to review police procedure.

What few officials – including New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani – expected was that, more than one month later, the outrage over the Diallo killing would actually grow into a major debate about how the police deal with racial minorities.

Instead of dying down, the Diallo case has picked up momentum, with daily arrests of protestors – including Congressman Charles Rangel and former Mayor David Dinkins – who have been demonstrating outside of the main police headquarters.

Nor are the daily demonstrations restricted to critics of Giuliani and the police.

Former Mayor Ed Koch – who endorsed Giuliani’s re-election in 1997 – said he plans to be arrested during protests this week, despite his ill health. “The way to get this mayor’s attention is not to give a speech, but to get arrested,” Koch argued.

Former Congressman Floyd Flake, a black Democrat who broke ranks by supporting the Republican mayor, has also announced that he will join the demonstrations.

New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, meanwhile, announced plans to review the police department’s procedures for conducting weapons searches, while Governor George Pataki – like Giuliani, a Republican – openly questioned the mayor’s response to the protests.

Speaking to ABC television Sunday, Pataki said that, while Giuliani and the New York Police Department (NYPD) have done “an excellent job” dealing with crime, “the Diallo incident was so horrendous and so horrific that it has created a sense of moral outrage…where all of us have to take a look.”

Pataki warned that Giuliani was not “responding appropriately to criticism” over the matter.

Diallo’s killing struck a chord among New Yorkers: The Bronx street peddler was returning home from work when he was shot 41 times by for officers who believed, incorrectly, that he could be a suspected rapist.

Diallo was unarmed and had no criminal record, while three of the four officers who shot him had prior cases in which they had fired on suspects.

More importantly, Diallo’s killing is just the latest incident in which white police officers are accused of shooting or otherwise killing black or Latino civilians with little evidence of any threat.

In a 1996 report on the NYPD, Amnesty International cited 90 incidents in which “police officers appeared to have resorted to unwarranted levels of force, out of all proportion to any threat posed, in violation of their own guidelines.”

Giuliani ignored that report, and has routinely defended the police from any charges of inappropriate behaviour.

Many protestors have argued that Giuliani’s seeming indifference – he has not accused the officers of any wrongdoing – has been worse than the shooting itself. Giuliani has called the protests “publicity stunts” and said they were becoming “redundant.”

The mayor has pinned much of his popularity in recent years to New York’s falling crime rate, in which gun murder rates have dwindled from some 2,000 a year in the early 1990s to fewer than 700 last year. But at the same time, African Americans and Latinos especially have complained of increasing brutality by police officers.

Some recent studies have shown a clear disparity in law enforcement tactics in white and in black communities. A recent Daily News study contended that nearly half the gun arrests made by the Street Crimes Unit – the same special branch of the NYPD whose officers were involved in the Diallo shooting – were ruled invalid in courts. Most of the arrests occurred in black neighbourhoods.

The Diallo shooting has thus fed into the same pool of distrust about unfair policing as the alleged torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima two years ago.

Louima accused several Brooklyn police officers of beating him and shoving a broom handle up his rectum – causing serious internal bleeding – when they mistakenly arrested him in a 1997 brawl; his case against the officers, which has yet to come to trial, also prompted citywide protests.

According to a poll in The New York Times, nearly 45 percent of white New Yorkers, and nearly four-fifths of black New Yorkers, believe that the police force is biased against African Americans.

Giuliani has dismissed such complaints during his five years in office but the mayor, who is considering running for the US Senate next year, may have to take those complaints seriously as the Diallo dispute shows no sign of fading away.