The Adam McFadden action figure would come with the right hand permanently molded in "cell-phone grip!"

The device never leaves the City Council member's side as we cruise the interstate on the way to a TV appearance; McFadden was tapped to talk about the then-impending inauguration of President Barack Obama. McFadden forgot our appointment, so this 20-minutes-and-change in his SUV is improvisation in the extreme.

If you know McFadden by his press clippings only, you might expect a confrontational, "angry black man" archetype - champion of any cause that gets him a headline. And there are those who believe that's who he is.

But to many, McFadden's an Alpha Activist; a representative willing to aggressively fight for them and to try new ideas to nurse the community's many wounds.

McFadden says that what people are really seeing is a politician who speaks his mind and acts his conscience no matter which way the political world is spinning. Zero Tolerance? Not working. Children's Zone? There's an active campaign by certain elected officials to kill it, although McFadden won't name names.

"I've never been anyone's rubber stamp," he says. "When Bill Johnson was here, I was critical of him, and this was the guy that gave me a scholarship to go to college."

McFadden is a larger-than-life figure - a large, African American man with his signature dreadlocks falling around his shoulders. In his mid 30's, McFadden has been on City Council for six years and is chair of the Public Safety Committee.

In an interview, McFadden talks about the police, the election of the nation's first African-American president, and why he won't run for mayor - probably.

The following is an edited version of that interview.

CITY: Is Zero Tolerance working? Police Chief David Moore says it is, and homicides are down, from 50 in 2007 to 44 in 2008.

McFadden: Not at all. The police aren't the solution to the problem of crime. Their job is to respond when crime happens; it's not to be mind readers and try to figure out ahead of time who's going to commit a homicide.

I think a lot of this has been smoke and mirrors; trying to show that people are doing a job, and I don't think anyone questions whether or not police are doing a good job. I think that people question the tactics.

What we've seen is an increase in arrests around disorderly conduct, traffic infractions, stuff like that. None of those, in my mind, have suggested that we are stopping homicides or stopping violence.

When we talk about a decrease in homicides for the year, if you look around the state, homicides are down. If you look around the country, homicides are down right now. So the figure really isn't as good as we might want to pretend it is. And then when you compare it to other cities with the same economic situation and the same gender and race situation, we're not doing that great at all.

You clashed with Chief Moore following a vigil marking the one-year anniversary of Latasha Shaw's murder. At the vigil, you announced that you had asked the state attorney general's office for help solving the crime. You were accused of grandstanding and of dishonoring Shaw's memory.

The only people that accused me of that are people who don't know her or her family. Latasha Shaw's mother and my mother grew up in the same community in South Carolina; their back yards touched. My aunt is Latasha Shaw's godmother.

If you talk to the mother, the father, and the family of Latasha Shaw, they were happy about what I did. They knew what I was going to do before I did it. So it wasn't grandstanding.

The police were never invited to the vigil; they showed up on their own. I had already talked to the chief and said that if a year passes without any arrests, that I planned on kicking it up a notch. So this was not a total surprise. But his feelings were hurt, and I probably could've done it a little better.

This was not about the chief. This was about the family. For someone to say I disrespected her memory, go talk to the family and find out if they believe that.

If it was your family member and a year went by and there were 40 people who saw almost two dozen people jump on one lady and there were no arrests, what would you have someone do?

You feel that African Americans are not sufficiently represented on the police force.

Look at the classes of African-American candidates - the recruit classes. We have not followed the consent decree in a long time - a judgment that was done back in the 70's that said we had to hire so many African-American officers because of representation of the community.

For me, if you want to end some of the tension between the community and the police, you have to hire people from the community.

You are one of the original players in the Rochester Children's Zone, later called Surround Care. The agency has had a rocky road, and now Governor Paterson wants to eliminate all of its funding. How can it survive?

The players around the support of the Children's Zone were much different when we started out. We had a superintendent, Manny [Rivera], who saw this as something that he could use to help a distressed community. He put together a vision and he went out and got the community support behind it. And then when he went to work for Governor Spitzer, he was able to secure some funding for us from the state. Manny's no longer at the state; Spitzer's no longer the governor. And we're left trying to keep a promise to a community that has had many promises made to it, but broken.

On my own reputation, there's no way that I'm going to walk away and allow it to not succeed. But I said from the beginning that it wasn't going to take a year; it was going to take 20 years. And any belief that it's shorter than that is a false belief.

I think we roll up our sleeves - we still have some state funding left - and we try to build support so we can go out and find individual donors and foundations that will support the vision. And if it's not there, we can continue to do what we've been doing with just volunteers and partnerships.

What does Obama mean to the black community?

He's president and it's a great historical day, but he has a tough road ahead of him. If we treat him like he's Superman or Batman, we will all fail this community. We have to listen to what he's been saying, which is, "We're the solution to our problems." I really have always believed that.

I think many of us in the African-American community have been pretending with ourselves, like Malcolm or Martin is just going to show up one day and solve all the problems of the world. They didn't solve all the problems of the world when they were here. What they did is help to empower people to go out and help solve their problems; and I think we've forgotten that.

What he is a reflection of is, if you plan, work hard, if you have a little bit of luck on your side, you can be and do anything.

You talk a lot about cultural competency. What do you mean by that?

If you took maybe the average young person in the city school district - and I don't say this to be stereotyping anyone - and you pose a question like, "What makes you tick?" That may not resonate with them like if I said, "What's your flavor?" There's just a way of communicating with individuals that people may not be sensitive to.

When I saw the campaign for "Snitch? You Bet I Told," I said to myself, "Who's the campaign talking to?" Because the people in the street, even the people who work with police don't want to be labeled a snitch. When you talk about being culturally competent, it's just understanding the community that you're serving.

I think we look at young people as if they're supposed to meet us where we're at, instead of us meeting them where they're at.

Any plans to run for mayor?

Nope. I've been getting this question a lot lately, because I think people think that I might be a great candidate. But I'm such a young guy. There are some things that I don't like about being in the fishbowl that I'm in.

That's not to say that a decade or two decades from now I won't change my mind. But I have no plans in challenging Mayor Duffy.

What if Duffy runs for county executive and wins?

Then maybe the ballgame changes.

People think that I want to challenge our mayor, and I don't. I think he's doing a good job with the resources that he has. We probably agree on 99 percent of things. It's just that the one percent that we don't, people hear about it.

Do you see yourself as a polarizing figure?

No. I see myself as a regular guy who has an opinion.

I think I walk into a room and I gather all this attention because of my size, because of my hair, because I'm a black man. But truth be told, I like football on Sundays. I like hot wings. I like an occasional beer. And I like to be around my friends and family, like anybody else.

There haven't been too many people who've sat in my seat or sat in politics and just spoke openly. And if I get chopped down for that, so be it. The only way to avoid criticism is to do nothing, and I could easily just sit there and rubber-stamp the mayor, keep my mouth closed, and people would think that's OK. But that's not the type of person I am. The moment I can't be myself, I wouldn't do it.