The Queens district attorney, Richard Brown, has gone to hundreds of crime scenes in his 15 years in office, but he didn’t rush to Jamaica early Saturday morning when he learned that police were involved in a shooting that left a man dead on his wedding day.

It wasn’t because Mr. Brown wasn’t awake — the 74-year-old was up and out of bed when he took a call from a senior aide at 5 a.m. Sean Bell had been dead for only an hour, but Mr. Brown said he wanted to be careful.

“I decided that my presence there at the scene would intrude upon, in one respect or another, the investigation,” the district attorney said yesterday in a telephone interview.

Mr. Brown dispatched his deputies to the scene, but the former appellate judge will be front and center in a case that threatens to reopen deep wounds between predominantly black communities and law enforcement. Critics of Mr. Brown’s office have already called for Governor Pataki and Governor-elect Spitzer to appoint a special prosecutor to handle the Bell case, but Mr. Brown is adamant that it stay in local hands.

“This is a case that should be investigated and responded to by the people of Queens County,” Mr. Brown said. Saturday’s police shooting was “amongst the most important investigations that we’ve had here in this office in the 15 years that I’ve been district attorney,” he said.

Already worried that a judge could order a change of venue should the case go to trial, Mr. Brown said he cautioned Mayor Bloomberg, in a conversation yesterday morning, to guard against making statements that would prejudice the investigation. The district attorney also issued a similar warning to Bell’s family, Queens elected officials, and clergy members, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, at a meeting in Mr. Brown’s office Monday night. Mr. Brown said he cited the case against police officers in the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo, in which the venue for a trial was moved to Albany.

“I would urge everyone to withhold judgment and lower the level of rhetoric until all of the facts are known,” Mr. Brown said.

The mayor on Monday and again yesterday said the firing of 50 shots by police seemed “excessive.” The district attorney wouldn’t comment on those statements.

Mr. Brown — known to many as Judge Brown because of his long tenure on the bench — first won election as district attorney in 1991 after Governor Cuomo had picked him to serve out the term of the retiring John Santucci. Before his appointment, he had served for 10 years as an associate justice in the appellate division of the state Supreme Court. He’s prosecuted his share of controversial cases, and he won the conviction of the only man still residing on New York’s death row, John Taylor. In the “Wendy’s massacre,” Taylor in May 2000 herded seven workers into the freezer of a Wendy’s in Flushing and shot them all in the head, killing five.

A lifelong resident of Queens, Mr. Brown has been reelected three times with little opposition, and he elicits praise from many city leaders. That includes Mr. Bloomberg, who yesterday said Mr. Brown “has the kind of record that should give everybody in this city confidence that he will do the kind of professional, fair and impartial job that we want our law enforcement district attorneys to do.”

But the accolades are not universal. Some in the black community in Queens who have long complained of abuse and racial profiling by the police say Mr. Brown is too close to the Police Department. “The district attorney has not been too good to the African American community in this area,” the pastor of Bethesda Missionary Baptist Church in Jamaica, Rev. Charles Norris, said. As a chief example, Rev. Norris cited the case of a black 17-year-old, Xavier Simpson, who was arrested in June and charged with disorderly conduct. Mr. Simpson claims that four police officers beat him up, breaking his elbow and wrist. Mr. Brown dismissed the charges against Mr. Simpson last month, but he has not prosecuted the police officers, angering some in the community.

The district attorney’s office said the complaint was referred back to the internal affairs bureau of the Police Department, along with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

“Does he have a reputation for doing everything a community wants? No. But he has a reputation for being thorough,” a City Council member representing Jamaica, Leroy Comrie, said.

Mr. Brown said he had “the respect of the law enforcement community and the confidence of the people of the county.” His goal, he said, was to complete his investigation “as expeditiously as possible” with the reputation of his office intact.

At 74, the district attorney said he wakes up by 6 a.m. and often works past 10 p.m. He still plays doubles tennis almost every weekend, often in Litchfield, Conn., where he shares a country house with his wife, Rhoda. Mr. Brown is up for reelection next year, but he says he has no plans to retire and wants to match the tenure of his counterpart in Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, who, at 87, has held office for 31 years. “I, a mere child by comparison, look forward to serving at least as long as he has,” Mr. Brown said.