According to some of those accounts, it was one of the officers who first drew and possibly fired a gun, although no weapons have been recovered.

In the last year Mr. Shakur's run-ins with the police have resulted in his filing a $10 million brutality suit in Oakland, Calif.; an arrest in Los Angeles last March on charges, later dismissed, that he assaulted a limousine driver, and accusations still under investigation in Los Angeles that he and others beat up a film director.

He is the son of Afeni Shakur, who in the early 70's was among the New York 21, a group of Black Panthers accused of plotting bombings in New York; all were acquitted. Ms. Shakur was released from jail when she was eight months' pregnant with Tupac. This background figures prominently in his press packet and his publicist, Taliba Mbonisi, says Tupac Shakur's "revolutionary credentials are in his blood."

Although many of Mr. Shakur's lyrics talk of "droppin' the cops" and the plight of young black men caught in a violent world, Ryan Cameron, a disk jockey on Atlanta radio station WVEE-FM, said that his work was "not limited to the gangster fairy-tale rap." While he played a gun-wielding gang member in the 1992 movie "Juice," Mr. Shakur this year played a conscientious postal worker courting Janet Jackson in "Poetic Justice."

"He has done raps encouraging young black women who have had children out of wedlock to keep their heads up," said Mr. Cameron. "But he is seen as someone who has a rebellious nature. And sometimes that gets you into trouble." Celebratory Couples

The police say witnesses gave this account of the incident in Atlanta: Mark Whitwell, 33, a police officer in Clayton County, just south of Atlanta, and his wife were crossing an Atlanta street with Mr. Whitwell's brother Scott, a 32-year-old police officer in Henry County, and his wife. Scott Whitwell's wife had recently passed the state bar examination and the two couples were out celebrating.

After the couples were nearly hit by a car, the two officers, who were both in civilian clothes, argued with the driver and passengers of the car as well as the occupants of a second car that pulled up.