Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and former-Mayor David Dinkins both endorsed the mayor for a second term on Sunday as his campaign continues to ramp up.
Mayor Bill de Blasio addressed churchgoers in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Harlem, addressing everything from his administration’s mental health efforts to his meeting last week with president-elect Donald Trump.
Speaking at Salem Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Adams, a former police captain, said de Blasio “gets” the needs of New Yorkers, allowing that while the city isn’t perfect, de Blasio is the best person to make it better.
“Nothing is better than having a leader of the city that is as diverse as New York, particularly Brooklyn,” Adams said. “He gets that we may not be living in Trump Tower, but our houses are our towers.
“He understands that you love seeing your police officers on the corners and you’re police officers there, and you don’t want your communities to be ripped apart by 9 mm bullets that take the lives of innocent people … he understands that a police officer can be on the corner and do good things in our community and do something revolutionary like saying ‘good morning,’” Adams added to murmurs of agreement.
For his part, de Blasio addressed the recent election, talking about some of the controversial issues that came up in the campaign like immigration.
“It’s been now less than two weeks since our nation took an unexpected turn. We are all finding our way in this new reality,” de Blasio said. “We already know the way forward and it is what we do every day in New York City … One election doesn’t change who we are.”
De Blasio also addressed the issue of stop and frisk, a hot-button issue that was curbed in the city after it was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2013, but thrust into the national spotlight during the presidential election when Trump advocated it be rolled out to the rest of the country. De Blasio met with Trump last week, talking for an hour and addressing several topics, including Stop and Frisk.
“We ended that broken and unconstitutional policy, and we started healing and we started neighborhood policing so police and community will get to know each other and become partners. It will take time, you don’t erase decades of history immediately,” he said. “I looked [Donald Trump] in the eye a few days ago and I said ‘that policy of Stop and Frisk, the way it was used, it was unconstitutional, it was broken, it created a rift between police and community, it actually made us less safe.”
Later in the day, De Blasio spoke at the Convent Ave Baptist Church in Harlem where Dinkins threw his support behind the re-election campaign. Dinkins then showed de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray out of the church, seeing them off.
De Blasio has received a slew of union endorsements over the last week, including the backing of 32BJ on Thursday, the largest union of property service workers in the country.
He was also endorsed by the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association, according to published reports.
De Blasio is the only prominent Democrat to yet announce his bid for mayor in 2017, but several names have been floated as possible challengers, including former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr.
