WASHINGTON: As the pastor of a large church, former U.S. Rep. Floyd Flake saw the positive effects in minority neighborhoods of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's crackdown on petty crimes.

''He did a phenomenal job of cleaning up crime in my neighborhood. The mayor responded extremely well to the community,'' said Flake, the pastor of the Greater A.M.E. Cathedral of New York in Queens and a former Democratic lawmaker who enthusiastically endorsed Giuliani for a second term in 1997.

But something has changed in Giuliani, Flake now says, and a mayor whom New York magazine once dubbed perhaps the only white politician who could get cheers in Harlem seemed to grow distant, even hostile, toward blacks.

''By the second term, I couldn't talk to him. Many people couldn't talk to him,'' Flake recalled. ''He talked to almost no one in the African-American community. I don't believe he was accepting any counsel from anybody. It was like a war with him.''

As the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Giuliani is presenting himself as a unifier who cut crime and restored a sense of civility to a hard-boiled city.

But many blacks recall Giuliani as a divider who exacerbated tensions by refusing to meet with black leaders — even elected ones — and stood solidly behind the city's police amid a series of violent, racially tinged incidents.

''There was a climate that police officers were willy-nilly violating civil rights with racial profiling and stop-and-search,'' said Michael Myers, the head of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. ''It was a climate, a culture the mayor could have changed, but he didn't. He has a 'however' record — very mixed, very disturbing from a standpoint of civil liberties and race.''

Giuliani supporters say he's getting a bad rap. They say his policies benefited poor minority communities that had long been taken for granted by Democrats who ran the city before Giuliani's election in 1993.

''History will read that Rudy Giuliani had an extraordinary tenure of reducing crime by historic proportion, reviving the local economy and bringing hundreds of thousands of jobs to the city,'' said Randy Mastro, who was Giuliani's chief of staff. ''Some of the most profound effects were felt in the city's poorest and minority communities.''

Rudy Washington, who is black and was Giuliani's deputy mayor, said Giuliani had good relations with the community, earning more than 20 percent of the black vote in 1997 in a heavily Democratic city.

''There was no race problem,'' Washington said. ''All that stuff, it's from the usual suspects saying the same thing, and the press would run with it.''

Giuliani supporters say questions about race and him are a legacy of the bruising election battles he had in 1989 and 1993 with Democrat David Dinkins, who won the first election to become New York's first black mayor but lost the second.

But Fran Reiter, another former Giuliani deputy mayor, said Giuliani erred by keeping elected black officials at arm's length.

''That was one of his great mistakes as mayor,'' said Reiter, who supports New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for president. ''The community he really didn't reach out to was Harlem. I believe he believed he could never win Harlem over because of his defeat of David Dinkins, so he didn't try.''