New York ? Pumped up with pride and indignation, thousands of police and firefighters turned up the heat Thursday on Mayor Michael Bloomberg for proposing a pay raise they denounced as paltry.

The orderly, boisterous two-hour demonstration packed six city blocks. It brought out upward of 15,000 from departments that have garnered national recognition for their response to the Sept. 11 attack and heavy casualties in their ranks.

With fierce speeches and hand-scrawled signs, the crowd demanded larger annual pay raises than the 5 percent a year for two years that the cash-strapped city has recommended.

Some signs targeted Bloomberg’s law-and-order predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, who in 1996 and 1997 held police salaries steady for two years in light of budget pressures and in spite of contentions by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Assn. president of that time that officers should be rewarded for the sharp drop in crime.

The state Public Employee Relations Panel recently recommended pay raises of 5 percent a year for officers, emphasizing the city’s arguments about its hard-pressed financial condition.

In addition, the panel recommended police work an additional 10 days a year. Negotiations between the city and union are continuing, with the PBA president Pat Lynch calling for a 23 percent pay hike over two years.

Bloomberg has said he would like to pay police and firefighters more but is hampered by shortfalls in the city budget.

Uniformed Firefighters Assn. spokesman Tom Butler, meanwhile, said that his union had been without a contract for 27 months and without a pay raise. The union’s leaders tentatively agreed to a 5 percent annual wage increase last year, but decided not to put it out to a vote after Sept. 11.

While some elected officials who were invited skipped the event, according to the organizers, one who did attend, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, drew a roar of boos as she approached the podium.

But that changed when Clinton called it “unconscionable” that, despite the Sept. 11 attack, the police who lost 23 officers and firefighters, who lost 343 from their ranks, have not received raises since then.

“I don’t think there should be zeroes for heroes,” she said, as the jeers turned to cheers.

The reaction from City Hall Thursday night was muted. A Bloomberg spokesman, reading from a prepared statement, said: “We have the best police officers and firefighters in the world and the mayor has no problem with the peacefully exercising their First Amendment right to freedom of expression.”