Public Safety and the New York City Mayor's Race Where they differed was in how such safety should be preserved and by whom. For an hour they batted around ideas worth listening to - at least until the Rev. Erick Salgado from Staten Island said that he might appoint Rudolph Giuliani as police commissioner. After Mr. Salgado, the one with the next-most-troubling argument, wearing the front-runner's Velcro, was Speaker Christine Quinn, who espoused positions both dissonant and contradictory. She stoutly defended Commissioner Raymond Kelly of the New York Police Department, while supporting the creation of an inspector general with broad powers to rein in abuses at the department. This was odd because the main reason the calls for an inspector general have become so acute - and necessary - is that the Police Department under Mr. Kelly has vastly expanded its widely loathed and constitutionally offensive tactic of stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of citizens a year. Ms. Quinn says she wants to reduce abuses of that tactic - which she calls "stop, question and frisk" - while keeping Mr. Kelly, stop-and-frisk's architect, enforcer and, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of its most strident defenders. Ms. Quinn's rivals had fun with the contradictions. William Thompson, the former city comptroller, said if he were mayor, an inspector general would not be necessary because he would keep the Police Department from doing such things. When John Liu, the current comptroller, yelled, "Stop and frisk in New York City is the biggest form of systemic racial profiling we have anywhere in the United States of America, and it has to be ended," you could almost see him counting characters for Twitter. The city's public advocate, Bill de Blasio, zinged Ms. Quinn for opposing - along with Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly - a City Council bill that would allow New Yorkers to sue in state court if they have been racially profiled by the police. "I think we need that bill," he said, "as another step toward healing and strengthening the relationship between police and community." Ms. Quinn says she will allow the bill to come to a vote but not support it. The Democrats face a challenge in trying to follow a mayor who - with much credit to Mr. Kelly - is running a city where crime has fallen. But they correctly noted that stop-and-frisk is not the cause of falling crime and, in fact, creates a host of other problems. They stressed that the Police Department badly needs to reset its relations with residents - particularly young black and Hispanic men who are the subjects of unlawful stops. The price of stop-and-frisk is hard to add up: how do you measure humiliation, disrespect, community suspicion and fear, or the cost when young men's lives are derailed or suspended by abusive police tactics? The city and its next mayor can and should go forward with a new police commissioner. Here is where most of the Democrats have an edge over the Republican candidates - the former Giuliani deputy mayor Joseph Lhota, the supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis and the philanthropist George McDonald - who appeared at a forum on Tuesday and fell over themselves praising Mr. Kelly. "If we don't have stop-and-frisk, it could be stop-and-mug," Mr. Catsimatidis said. It was clear that the muggers he was speaking of were not the cops.