The result is that I have observed aspiring cops in classrooms, on the shooting range and in role-playing encounters with people inside homes, businesses and on the streets; and I have spoken with veterans and supervisors. Every cop I spoke to about the Diallo case thought the four guys who shot him had essentially screwed up. They unanimously said that it was what is called “a bad shooting,” driven by surprise and panic, of the sort that attends work in areas where there are many illegal automatic weapons, on the same streets where cops have died in action.

At the very least I expected a guilty verdict on the charge of reckless endangerment. But no matter how much howling and whining there might be, no matter all of the sanctimonious denouncements, I do not see police officers as bigoted white demons who arrive in so-called minority communities thinking that they are the anointed zoo keepers who must sometimes subdue the animals, and sometimes use deadly force against them. I also have no doubt whatsoever that there are cops who have those attitudes, but attitudes and actions are two very different things.

Those attitudes, when they are bad, create occupational hazards within law enforcement because brutal and dirty cops turn communities against the police. This means that an officer in mortal danger might lose his or her life because hostile community members may refuse to call 911, say “Officer in trouble” and make clear where the rough stuff is going on.

But the average cop already knows how that works, and those in charge try to combat bad attitudes among cynical cops, day by day. How the cynicism and brutality come about in certain cops is as understandable as it is deplorable. All too often, police officers meet people at their very worst — in family squabbles, under the influence, in the middle of melees. They come to know people when shocking things have been discovered about them, such as the fact that they have been brutalized or their children or their wives; or are guilty of sexually molesting the young; or have murdered their spouses or their parents; or function in worlds of vice so lowdown and dirty that the air around them seems darkened by spiritual coal dust.

In fact, one black cop said to me a few years back that if he weren’t black himself, he might be tempted to become a racist, given the terrible things that he witnessed on his job. One of the reasons that didn’t happen was that he knew dozens upon dozens of Negroes who were not like those who made life in high crime areas so abominable.

At the NYPD Police Academy, in the wake of the Louima and Diallo cases, there has been new emphasis on giving cops more information about the lives of those they will encounter in blue-collar communities inhabited by blacks and Latinos, so that those who dont know those communities intimately can come to understand them. In one class, for instance, a black female cop asked her students how they would handle a situation in which a woman, outraged that her child was being arrested, stepped into the middle of things. Now one thing you have to understand, she said to them: I’m big, I’m black, I’m a female and I might be very loud. But loud doesn’t always mean threatening, she explained.

In another class a black instructor brought a stone-cold street hustler to explain certain things to the recruits. (It turned out that his stone-cold hustler was actually a cop himself.) They role-played “stop and frisk” situations, and got to see how effective verbal judo could be, rather than force.

Some police critics have suggested that the Street Crimes Unit was inadequately trained, if a lone, unarmed man reaching for what turned out to be his wallet resulted in a storm of gunfire. But at the Police Academy, I myself have taken some of the shooting tests — where you are given an electronic nine millimeter pistol, and must make decisions very quickly as events take place on a film screen. Believe me, all of that stuff goes down much faster than you ever think and it is almost impossible to discern how many rounds you have fired when it seems that there is no other choice.

Interestingly, when Commissioner Safir offered to let some of those most critical of the NYPD try out some of these tests, they almost all declined, having no interest in knowing what kinds of pressures and decisions a cop has to make out there.

There are other things such people aren’t interested in. In New York, from 1991 to 1996, 4,840 black people were murdered by civilians while 82 were killed in police shootings; 1136 Hispanics were murdered and 57 lost their lives in police actions; 227 Asians were victims of homicide while two died at the hands of the cops. No professional “voices of the Third World,” like Norman Siegel of the New York Chapter of the ACLU, have disputed those numbers. Such people have not been particularly interested in organizing marches and protests against the crimes citizens themselves suffer at the hands of criminals.

If Diallo had been killed while caught in a cross-fire as rival drug dealers or gang bangers opened up on each other and accidentally shot him almost 20 times, he might have gotten a day or two in the press. There would have been no Rev. Al Sharpton, no huge protests, no coverage of his mother and father. But that is not how Diallo died, and how he did die led to certain predictable reactions from police critics.

Even so, I was as surprised as everybody else when the verdict came down in Albany, and the four cops walked. But this was no case of a change of venue leading a faraway jury to acquit cops New Yorkers would have found guilty. Arlene Taylor, the black woman who was the jury foreman, is from the Bronx. And Taylor says to those who don’t like the verdict: “Tough.” It was not a racial case as far as she, the other three black women and the rest of the jury were concerned. They did not believe that those men started moving toward Diallo with the intention of shooting, wounding or killing him.

In fact Robert Johnson, the black district attorney in the Bronx who brought the charges against the cops, has told his critics that the prosecution didn’t emphasize race in the Diallo case because he and his colleagues didn’t believe race was relevant to what the cops did wrong. And while disappointed in the verdict, Johnson made the point — correctly — that he didn’t build his case to satisfy his critics in the streets.

To his credit, Al Sharpton discouraged protesters from violence, saying such action would betray Diallo’s memory, and urged them to take the long march to justice. For all his flimflam, voluminous smoke and endless mirrors, Sharpton is a brilliant and complex man. He cut his feet off during the Tawana Brawley hoax, though, and the stumps have not carried him forward very well, especially with the press. But the media is not interested in the better angels of his nature, having ignored one of New York’s most important moments of racial healing, sponsored by Sharpton.

Last year he brought together Keith Mondello and Moses Stewart. Mondello was one of the white kids who mobbed and killed Yusef Hawkins, a young black man who came into their neighborhood to look into buying a used car that had been advertised in the newspaper; Stewart was Hawkins’ father. Mondello apologized to Stewart for having been one of the people who killed his son. But hardly a whisper was raised about this in the media, which means that news people are more interested in maintaining Sharpton as a purveyor of racial division rather than healing.

But all of these incidents, when looked at more than superficially, force us to reckon with the complexities of our society, the give and take, push and resistance, that mark the movement from murk to clarity. As a result of Diallo’s killing, the Street Crimes Unit the four cops were part of has been disbanded and its members dispersed throughout the NYPD. At the Police Academy, the torture of Abner Louima and the death of Amadou Diallo have created the desire to do a much better job, however remarkable the overall performance of the police has been as crime has declined for the last five or six years.

It is too bad that some things come about this way, but there is, quite often, a sacrificial element to the expansion of civilization. Society often cleanses itself in the blood of martyrs. That Diallo could be a martyr without his killers’ being murderers is probably too complex a concept for the purveyors of racial division to recognize.

“My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats,” Giuliani told Piers Morgan. “You won’t have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively.”

With a straight face, Giuliani explained why charges of “elitism” wouldn’t fly against Gingrich. “One of the strengths he has is he’s got a common touch, he’s able to talk to people, he comes from a poor family, understands poverty from that point of view. He doesn’t come from the American elite. It’s going to be hard to paint him that way. There are a lot of other ways you can paint him, but you can’t paint him that way.”

You can’t? The man with the half-million-dollar Tiffany credit line? The guy who wants to do away with “truly stupid” child labor laws? The one who thinks the poor lack a work ethic? The “historian” who earned just under $2 million from Fannie Mac and took in another $37 million for his healthcare think-tank? The candidate whose tax plan overwhelmingly favors the super-rich? How many ways is Giuliani wrong there? More ways than he and Gingrich have wives between them.

Can we also acknowledge there is no such thing as a “Reagan Democrat” anymore? There are white working-class people who now permanently vote against their own class interests, and they’re Republicans, not Democrats. Then there are white working-class people who are understandably sometimes confused about which party represents them, because Democrats have spent so many years sucking up to Wall Street and playing down their populist past. Some of those voters — the ones who are public workers, or union members, or close to retirement and listening to proposals to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare — are starting to realize that they have become the GOP’s latest scapegoat, the 21st century welfare queens, and they’re taking another look at Democrats. Some white working-class voters stayed Democrats. But the Reagan Democrat analysis hasn’t made sense for a long time.

Finally, I love the fact that Gingrich and Giuliani have six wives and two marriage annulments between them. Add in Donald Trump, who seems to be leaning toward Gingrich too, they can start a Three Wives Club. Way to go, family values party!

I’ll be talking about the latest on the GOP field with Ed Schultz and Ezra Klein on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 ET.

Then Giuliani ran for president. And he decided that marriage is between a man and a woman (followed by two more women). His sudden change of heart propelled him to a distant third-place finish in the Florida Republican primary, followed by his exit from the race.

Once Republican voters made it apparent that they were uninterested in the Mayor of 9/11, you’d expect that Giuliani would, with some sense of relief, stop hiding that one shred of basic decency that made him palatable. And now gay marriage will soon be a reality in New York state! But, nope. The New York Post reports:

Ten years later, Koeppel is distressed that his former house guest hasn’t returned the many calls he began making before the legislation was passed last week.

By the way: Rudy Giuliani will address a women’s club luncheon in New Hampshire next month. The dream lives!

Dear Rudy Giuliani: You will never be president. Ever. You will never actually be elected to anything again in your life. No one likes you. Your job now is to just continue cashing in on the day you happened to be in charge of New York when something terrible happened, and that job does not require that you continue to act like a bigot. Just FYI!

Polls this early are, as York should know, total hogwash. It’s a contest based on name recognition, long before most voters have started to pay attention. That’s why Giuliani led the Republican field in national polls throughout 2007, with Fred Thompson in second. Both candidates crashed and burned dramatically in the early primaries and were gone before Super Tuesday. There were four main reasons Giuliani’s campaign failed last time, and none of them have been ameliorated since:

His political record is too socially liberal. This is a guy who started his mayoral campaign in 1989 running to Ed Koch’s left and compared himself to liberal lion Fiorello La Guardia (whom he called New York’s greatest mayor). Although he shifted right when David Dinkins got the Democrats’ mayoral nomination, Giuliani remained pro-choice and pro-gay rights: He even once bunked with a gay couple and famously dressed in drag. Giuliani endorsed Mario Cuomo for governor in 1994. He was a New York Republican, not the sort who can play in South Carolina. His stance on abortion — Giuliani gave up on his brief attempt to pretend he is anti-abortion rights when it was revealed that he had donated to Planned Parenthood, the GOP’s new ACORN — would be a major sticking point. Elite national Republicans like King and York don’t actually care about abortion — see the sections in “Game Change” on how McCain advisors had no objection to putting Joe Lieberman on his ticket — but actual Republicans do. That’s why McCain reluctantly concluded that he couldn’t choose Lieberman. A pro-choice Republican nominee would either trigger significant defections from the religious right to a third-party candidate or simply prompt many of those voters to stay home next November.

He wasn’t terribly popular or successful as mayor. National Republicans may not know this, and New York Republicans like Peter King may have conveniently forgotten, but Giuliani’s political career was over before Sept. 11, 2001. His abrasive manner and controversial policies had resulted in lousy approval ratings. He was trailing carpetbagger Hillary Clinton in the 2000 Senate race before he dropped out. His vulnerabilities have never been seriously exploited by an opponent, but don’t think Mitt Romney would hesitate to unload on him in a close race, especially now that we’re four years further past Giuliani’s post 9/11 beatification.

Speaking of vulnerabilities, Giuliani has nasty skeletons in his closet, even by the standards of a Republican politician. He has been twice divorced: His first wife was his second cousin, and he  dumped his second wife for his quirky mistress, Judith Nathan, at a press conference before informing his wife in person. During the last campaign Ben Smith of Politico reported that Giuliani improperly used police escorts to take Nathan to trysts in the Hamptons. To be fair, Giuliani’s pecadillos pale in comparison to those of Bernard Kerik, a Giuliani crony who started as his driver and was ultimately promoted to chief of the NYPD. When Giuliani recommended Kerik to be secretary of Homeland Security after the 2004 election, a bevy of embarrassing revelations ensued, from his affair with publish Judith Regan in apartments near ground zero that were paid for by taxpayers and intended for rescue workers, to accepting favors from contractors with alleged mafia links.

He also has no message. Giuliani events in New Hampshire in 2008 were depressing affairs. Small crowds, silently bored to death by Giuliani droning on about the importance of lowering the corporate income tax and the various taxes he cut as mayor. It seemed that Giuliani figured he had the national security hawk vote lined up and needed to focus on fiscal conservatives (since he surely could not count on social conservatives). But his only line that drew applause was a throwaway at the end when he would mention the need to “stay on offense” against Islamist terrorism.

But that brings us to the point that Giuliani’s one major selling point — that he happened to be mayor of New York on 9/11 — has been surpassed by events since the last election. President Obama just killed Osama bin Laden, so Giuliani can hardly claim that he would be more committed to taking out al-Qaida. The Iraq war, which Giuliani vociferously supported, is viewed by everyone who doesn’t work for Fox News as a failure. Even the war in Afghanistan is increasingly unpopular. Meanwhile, the news out of the Middle East is of the Arab Spring, which gives us hope that the region will accommodate itself to modernity and democracy rather than being a fount of anger and frustration looking for a target. Giuliani’s dour and militaristic view of Middle Eastern affairs seems especially out of step with the times.

Mostly, Americans are just worried about the economy, and Giuliani already proved last time that he can’t win the nomination with an economic policy focus. Giuliani is unlikely to run, and if he does, he is virtually certain not to win the nomination. The discussion of a Giuliani candidacy is evidence of nothing so much as the desperation of Republicans who want an alternative to their current uninspiring field. But they should take heart: Michele Bachmann might still run.

Among Regan’s many charges against her old employer was the claim that a top News Corp. executive told her to lie to federal investigators about her affair with Kerik, when he was (unbelievably) being vetted to head Bush’s Department of Homeland Security in 2004. (He dropped his bid when legal troubles came to light, and he’s currently in prison for tax fraud.) The exec told her to lie, Regan said, to protect Giuliani, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and a close friend of Roger Ailes. Fox-haters speculated the “high executive” was Ailes himself, given the fawning coverage the former New York mayor got from Fox, but Regan settled the lawsuit for a cool $10.7 million payment from News Corp., and the matter seemed to end there.

Today the New York Times reveals that it was in fact Ailes who told Regan to lie about Kerik – and the paper says Regan had tape recordings to prove it. Fox isn’t even bothering to deny it; where in 2007 a News Corp. spokeswoman told the paper “the company saw no merit in the filing,” Wednesday a spokeswoman said only that News Corp. had a letter from Regan “stating that Mr. Ailes did not intend to influence her with respect to a government investigation,” adding, “The matter is closed.” (News Corp. officially retracted its claim that Regan was anti-Semitic as part of its settlement.) Regan’s lawyer insists News Corp. is misrepresenting Regan’s official statement, but he declined to say more.

He doesn’t need to say more: Affidavits reviewed by the Times show Regan’s former lawyers discussing “a recorded telephone call between Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News (a News Corp. company) and Regan, in which Mr. Ailes discussed with Regan her responses to questions regarding her personal relationship with Bernard Kerik.” The lawyer also said, “The Ailes matter became a focal point of our work” in preparing Regan’s case against her former employer. Key to Regan’s case was her claim she had been smeared with charges of anti-Semitism to preemptively discredit her in case she ever said anything about Kerik that could hurt Giuliani. “Regan believed that Ailes and News Corp. subsidiary Fox News had an interest in protecting Giuliani’s bid for the U.S. presidency,” he wrote.

You’ll recall that, in fact, back when Giuliani still seemed a viable presidential candidate, Kerik was a serious blemish on his record. Giuliani was regularly grilled not only about whether and when he knew about his former police commissioner’s many personal and legal troubles, but also about why he would recommend the man for a cabinet post. (The Bush administration was not amused.) Days before Regan dropped her legal bombshell, the Times revealed that Giuliani had in fact been briefed about Kerik’s ethics troubles by the city’s investigations commissioner before Giuliani appointed him to lead the police department in 2000.

After the Times story, the GOP candidate blithely told the Associated Press: “There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what’s the ultimate result for the people of New York City? The ultimate result for the people of New York City was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, a 60 percent reduction in crime … What Bernie Kerik did wrong did not implicate what the results were for the public.”

Classic Giuliani: Arrogant and stubborn. Now we have classic Roger Ailes: using his media power to protect a Republican political friend. Giuliani officiated at Ailes’ last wedding, and helped when Fox couldn’t get a New York cable channel. The man who started out as an aide to Richard Nixon has never left behind his party politics, despite his claims of being “fair and balanced.” We’ll see if Fox reports on the Times story.

Fittingly, the whole mess came to light because Regan’s former lawyers are now suing Regan herself, claiming she fired them on the eve of her settlement with News Corp. to cut them out of their contingency fee. The affidavits the Times reviewed were mistakenly left public; they have since been removed from the public case file. What a tangled web.

Judith Regan was last seen on the Bravo television hit “Millionaire Matchmaker,” which sets up lonelyhearts moneybags with appropriate partners. (Her TV date went well; no affidavits have come to light revealing whether she found true love.)

Bernie Kerik was last seen on Twitter, railing against the so-called ground zero mosque — from prison. It all makes sense: Fox helped gin up the mosque non-story; Park51 is only blocks from the apartment for 9/11 rescuers that Kerik used as a love nest during his affair with Regan, which Ailes wanted Regan to lie about.

And Rudy Giuliani? His presidential bid imploded in 2008, he had to fold his consulting firm last year, but the New York Post claimed last month that he’s looking at a 2012 presidential bid. The Post is, of course, owned by News Corp.