With passions running high, several hundred people gathered last night in Lower Manhattan to protest police aggression, more than a week after a Queens man was shot dead by police.

Fueled by anger over the shooting, some 500 demonstrators filled Foley Square, hoisting signs that read, “NYPD: Guilty” and “Stop police terror.” They also took to the streets, stopping traffic along a route through Centre and Worth streets, Broadway, and Chambers Street.

Organized more than a month ago by the December 12th Movement, the event drew a range of protesters. “These pigs are still shooting and killing us. What are we going to do?” a co-founder of the movement, Viola Plumer, said. Members of the New Black Panthers Party also attended, shouting, “Black power” and “Death to the pigs” to announce their arrival.

As a crowd gathered around him, the group’s New York City leader, Shakar Shakur, said, “If you’re gonna come into the black community, we got guns, too.” He was interrupted by a great-aunt of Sean Bell, the man shot by police. “We want a peaceful march,” Gloria Porter, 63, said. “We’re not a family about violence.”

In a separate incident just hours before the event kicked off, police shot and injured a man they said was armed during a confrontation in Brooklyn. At about 1:30 p.m., police said five officers intercepted four men about to carry out an armed robbery in the vicinity of Farragut Road and East 29th Street in East Flatbush. After one suspect fled, three officers in a car and one on foot chased him for several blocks and shouted “Police, stop,” until he turned on one officer and showed a loaded gun, police said. The officer fired one time, striking him in the upper thigh. Police arrested the four, including the one who was shot. He was in stable condition at Kings County Hospital last night.

Last night, police indicated the shooting seemed to be within department guidelines. “Preliminary information indicates that the shooting appears to be within departmental guidelines, which allow for the use of deadly force when there is a threat of death of serious injury to the police officer or another person present,” the top police spokesman, Deputy Commissioner of Information Paul Browne, said.

Last night, demonstrators focused on Bell, who was killed on November 25, outside the Kalua Cabaret in Jamaica, Queens, when police fired 50 times at him and two friends. Joseph Guzman, 31, and Trent Benefield, 23, survived the shooting.

Surrounded by throngs of people, community activists and officials, including City Council Member Charles Barron, were cheered on by an energized crowd. “We are saying we’ve had enough,” Mr. Barron, who reiterated a call for the police commissioner’s resignation, said. “We know for a fact 50 bullets were shot. We know for a fact these boys did not have a gun.”

Despite Mr. Barron’s rhetoric, representatives from the Queens district attorney’s office yesterday declined to comment on progress made in the investigation. Police have said a fourth man may have been in the car when police opened fire, possibly armed.

Mayor Giuliani, who spoke to reporters at a Greenwich Village firehouse, declined to comment on the case. “It’s an investigation being conducted by the district attorney,” he said. “When the district attorney finishes the investigation, then that would be the time when I could make a useful comment.”

In contrast to previous public gatherings, yesterday’s demonstration lacked many elected officials and public figures who have been vocal in their criticism of police in the wake of Bell’s death.

Noticeably absent was the Reverend Al Sharpton, who said he spent time yesterday with the family of Joseph Guzman, while Guzman underwent surgery. “A lot of groups are doing a lot of things. I support all the protests that go on,” Rev. Sharpton said. “I can’t make them all.”

Few of Bell’s family members attended, either. “It’s just too soon for this family, they are still in the process of grieving and mourning for their son,” an attorney who represents Bell’s parents, Neville Mitchell, said.

However, some said they stayed away because of the December 12th Movement, an activist group seen by some as outside the mainstream.”I do not identify with or respect them,” the president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, Michael Meyers, said. “It’s an extremist movement, in many ways hysterical in terms of their racial politics.”

Despite those concerns, police said there were no arrests last night. Although the group had only a sound permit to accommodate bullhorns, after nearly an hour of demonstrating in Foley Square they took to the streets behind a banner that read “Police #1 enemy.” En masse they marched through Lower Manhattan, concluding back in Foley Square, where they promised to shut down Wall Street with another mobilization on December 22.

As the crowd lingered, police said there had been no major injuries, although a police sergeant was taken to the hospital with a broken nose after a demonstrator threw a cardboard tube used to hoist a poster at her. They were unable to identify the individual who threw the tube.