Last month Tony Dawson said he was running against Mayor John DeStefano because the mayor doesn’t care about young black men murdered in the streets. On Friday Dawson endorsed DeStefano — in part, he said, because of a new commitment to community policing.
Dawson made that endorsement and that argument at a press conference outside the John C. Daniels School on Congress Avenue. He backed Democratic nine-term incumbent DeStefano over independent Jeffrey Kerekes for the Nov. 8 mayoral general election.
Dawson, along with attorney Clifton Graves, was one of two African-American candidates who challenged and lost to the mayor in the primary. Dawson’s endorsement comes less than two weeks before a general election in which no black candidates are running, and the black vote is still up for grabs.
That dynamic was on display Friday as the Kerekes campaign responded to the Dawson endorsement by releasing an open letter from two prominent African-American supporters, high school principal Gary Highsmith and attorney Michael Jefferson, who said that Dawson had “folded like a cheap suit.” (Click here to read the letter.) And Kerekes announced the endorsement of an African-American alderman, West Rock’s Darnell Goldson. (Click here to read Goldson’s endorsement.)
The Friday DeStefano campaign event marked an about-face for Dawson. Dawson relentlessly lambasted the mayor during the primary campaign, including sending out attack mailers featuring an unflattering photo of DeStefano. When he announced his candidacy, Dawson said that unless voters dump DeStefano, “New Haven is well on its way to becoming a city where no one wants to raise children, own a home, or work or do business.”
On Friday morning, Dawson walked that statement back. He also retreated from several other campaign remarks, including a charge that the mayor had rewarded potential campaign contributors by privatizing the Clemente school and and another that the mayor’s “top-down” approach has produced a chain of “failed ideas.”
Click the play arrow above to watch Dawson explain his changes of heart.
Dawson said he was swayed in part by the mayor’s recent appointment of community policing advocate Dean Esserman — who served as assistant chief in New Haven in the ‘90s — as the new chief of police.
Dawson, then an alderman, worked with Esserman in the 1990s. He liked what he saw.
The mayor has done “as much as he could do” to address youth violence, Dawson said. “The biggest thing that he could do is at least get a chief that can that engage and that has been in the town and has demonstrated that he can work with children and gangs.”
Thomas MacMillan Photo
DeStefano and Dawson.
“I’m not so much blaming the mayor” through his past campaign attacks on DeStefano, Dawson continued. “That was a political idea — political things that we’re saying now.”
Asked about another primary-campaign criticism of the mayor, Dawson reiterated that that was “political.”
“What I said then was a political statement that I was making at the time,” he said. “After the primary people felt that we should pull it together.”
“At the end of the day, campaigns are about defining agendas,” the mayor interjected. “And this isn’t about me necessarily continuing doing everything I’ve done before.”
Campaign cycles “help reset the agenda for this city,” DeStefano said. Both the mayoral and aldermanic races raised “good points” about “how we engage young people particularly.”
In the Democratic mayoral primary, DeStefano’s opponents repeatedly called for a return to walking beat-style community policing. So did many of the labor-backed candidates who defeated the mayor’s slate in Board of Aldermen primaries. Since then DeStefano has announced a partial return to walking beats (officers assigned ad hoc on a day-by-day basis to temporary rotating shifts in different neighborhoods); then brought in Esserman, who promised a full-blown return to permanent neighborhood walking beats and other community-policing strategies.
DeStefano said Friday that both the aldermanic and mayoral primaries had helped contributed to the “reset” on that issue.
“Statesman’s Role”
“Some of this stuff was attention-grabbers,” Dawson said later, when reminded of his charge that the mayor engaged in cronyism.
“All I know is that as I move forward, I lost the primary. He’s the person who won the primary. I’m a try Democrat. That’s who I’m supporting,” Dawson said.
Dawson said he chose to endorse DeStefano because “at the end of the day, we need some experienced people.”
Dawson said he looks forward to acting as a “statesman” and “ambassador” with the mayor to work on the issues of crime and violence in the city. “I’m not looking for a job,” he said. “I’m not looking to be on the mayor’s payroll.”
Asked about Highsmith and Jefferson’s letter criticizing him, Dawson said both he and Graves had asked for the two men’s support during the primary campaign, and not received it. That says something about the African-American community, Dawson said. “That’s why I have to take the statesman’s role.”
Black candidates don’t get the opportunity to run everyday, and the black community should support them when they do, Dawson said. “I got that out of neither one of them.”
Neither Kerekes, Highsmith, or Jefferson has held a “public service” position, he said. They are “critics” who “stand on the sidelines,” Dawson said.