THE LINEUP: The Democratic mayoral candidates go at it last night, with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn taking most of the flak from her foes. Sal Albanese is not pictured.
Democrats battling for Mayor Bloomberg’s job squared off in their first debate last night, sparring over stop-and-frisk and a City Council bill that would make it easier to sue the Police Department for racial profiling.
“We need to pass legislation to ban racial profiling . . . I think we need that bill,” Public Advocate Bill de Blasio said.
In a speech earlier, Council Speaker Christine Quinn had said the bill — which would let people who claim they were racially profiled during stop-and-frisks sue for NYPD policy changes — would give courts too much power over police.
That set her up for jabs from her opponents. Comptroller John Liu, who also backs the bill, charged: “Stop-and-frisk is the biggest use of racial profiling in the United States of America.’’
Former City Comptroller Bill Thompson, who tried to unseat Bloomberg in 2009, claimed that had he been elected mayor four years ago, the use of stop-and-frisk would not have escalated.
“If we would’ve had a different mayor in City Hall — to be honest about it, if I would’ve been the mayor of the City of New York — stop-and-frisk wouldn’t be a problem. We wouldn’t have to address that,” Thompson said in one of the livelier moments of an otherwise tepid debate.
“To be blunt about it, if we hadn’t changed term limits we wouldn’t have this problem right now” — an obvious shot at Quinn, who backed Bloomberg’s bid to seek a third term.
Despite the sparring, no candidate landed anything close to a knockout blow.
The hourlong debate heated up only in the last few minutes, when de Blasio and Quinn accused one another of “revisionist history.”
De Blasio said Quinn agreed to support the NYPD inspector-general bill only after she came under fire from advocates, and claimed that she rebuffed his attempts to strengthen the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
“It’s very clear you were not willing to challenge [Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly,” de Blasio said, addressing Quinn, who has said she would keep Kelly as commissioner if she is elected.
“You’re simply making that up,” she shot back.
Quinn insisted de Blasio’s effort to strengthen the board was outside the power of the council.
The debate, sponsored by and aired on NY1, started off with a question about New York City’s preparedness for a terrorist attack in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Quinn called for installing mobile surveillance cameras.
“This really is going to help us have more eyes on the street, (a), and, (b), criminals and terrorists are never going to know exactly where the cameras are,” she said.
De Blasio responded by crediting first responders.
“The events in Boston unquestionably were not only tragic, they were sobering. But the response of the first responders there was extraordinary and I think reassuring to us all,” de Blasio said.
On their overall approach to public safety, several of the candidates repeated their proposals to hire more cops for a department that has been shrinking in manpower over the past decade.
Quinn called for 1,600 new cops, Thompson called for 2,000 and de Blasio said the force cannot shrink lower than its current size of roughly 34,000 officers.
De Blasio’s campaign immediately sent out an e-mail to supporters, saying Quinn, as speaker, allowed the force to be slashed to record levels through budget cuts.
All six candidates were onstage last night, including lesser-known Democrats Sal Albanese, a former city councilman from Brooklyn, and Erick Salgado, a Staten Island minister.
Albanese slammed de Blasio for not firing two staffers who tweeted anti-police comments, which were reported by The Post. One resigned.
Salgado got a rise out of the audience when he recalled being halted by a cop during a stop-and-frisk four weeks ago. “I said ‘I’m running for mayor!’ and he said, ‘Shut up, go back in the car, sir.’ ”
Additional reporting by David Seifman