While the New York mayoral race heats up, Republican Mayor Guiliani, long regarded as especially police-friendly, is finding that the brutality of the Louima case has placed him in a particularly ticklish situation. Thousands have marched on police headquarters and New York media coverage of the Haitian man's traumas has been unrelenting.

In any New York election, relations between police and city neighborhoods is generally a volatile issue. Following disclosure of the police-rapists, the press addressed the "Blue Wall of Silence," behind which all inquiries about police misbehavior are customarily kept a tight secret by co-workers.

The Mayor, Rudolph Guiliani and his Police Commissioner, Howard Safir, optimists both, predicted an end to such secrecy, but no other policemen have backed their predictions.

A total of four police officers have been charged in the Precinct's torture crime. In a quick scramble for political cover, the Mayor and his cohorts assured the public, after it was clear other officers were involved, that the "Blue Wall of Silence" was not a reality.

With an eye to political damage control, the Mayor also announced shake ups and shuffles in Brooklyn's 70^th Precinct where, in the stationhouse rest room, the anal abuse meted out to the immigrant occurred.

Reports indicate that the man assaulted by the police was described to hospital personnel by officers as injured having "gay sex."

Logs and telephone contacts required by police regulations have been shown to be juggled or ignored.

"It's all I know," and "I wasn't there," were typical of the responses of 70^th Precinct officers to police department interrogators. The internal investigators believe that at least a dozen more Precinct officers know about matters they are adamantly refusing to discuss.

The two officers who initially told of incidents that led to the arrest of four of their colleagues, were Eric Turetzky and Mark Schofield. Officer Turetzky has been quoted in The New York Times as having said that his mother had urged him to come forward with the truth, and so he had.

His frank admission as to his female source of advice makes Officer Turetzky's testimony anathema to macho-oriented members of the police combine, men accustomed to denying the existence of feminine influences on their psyches.

The second to break the Blue Wall code, Officer Schofield, has told how he lent his gloves to suspect-rapist Officer Volpe who became the first of the arrested lawmen. Schofield's motive for coming forth occurred, in part, because Volpe returned his gloves soiled, annoying the lender. Volpe had told him, when he complained, to wash the gloves.

Schofield did so, placing them on the top of a locker to dry. When he heard that his fellow officers were suspected of wooden-stick anal rape, however, he told a co-worker to hide the gloves. Afterwards, he telephoned internal affairs and explained what he thought had happened to cause the soiling of his gloves.

Investigators have, without getting further responses, offered over one-hundred policemen immunity if they will only testify against hypocritical offenders in their midst, criminals posing as upholders of the law.

Sluggishness and "human error" claimed by the police department's investigators, led to their arriving at the scene of the crime 36 hours following its commission, thus giving ample time to its perpetrators to eliminate evidence.

In the meantime, Mayor Guiliani's proposal to increase the salaries of New York City police by 13.3 percent over five years has been declared "reasonable" by an arbitration panel. If benefits are counted as salary, the total increase becomes 15.3 percent.