Public Employee Press

Ken Thompson for Brooklyn DA

DC 37's Executive Board voted unanimously Oct. 9 to endorse Ken Thompson - a former federal prosecutor with a history of standing up for victims - for Brooklyn District Attorney in the Nov. 5 general election. Voters called for change as Thompson beat incumbent Charles Hynes decisively in the Democratic primary election Sept. 10, but Hynes then switched to the Republican Party.

"The role of the DA is not to lock people up, it's to deliver justice," Thompson told the union board.

A native New Yorker, Thompson was part of the team that prosecuted Justin Volpe, the former Police Officer convicted of beating and sodomizing Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a Brooklyn precinct house. As a government attorney, he worked with U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer and later Congress member Yvette Clarke to convince the Justice Dept. to reopen the investigation into the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, which exposed the horrors of African American life in the segregated South and helped motivate the civil rights movement.

"I want you to hold me accountable," said Thompson, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. "You will see a different Brooklyn with one standard of justice for all."