Rice TV campaign ad raises questions

In a television commercial shot near the Brooklyn Bridge, Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice explains why she should be New York's next attorney general. A male narrator says she used an innovative program to reduce drug crimes 70 percent.

But the commercial, approved by Rice, doesn't make clear the crime reduction was confined to a six-block area of Hempstead Village.

Rice spokesman Eric Phillips said the ad refers to Rice's initiative that cleaned up an open-air drug market in the Terrace Avenue-Bedell Street area of Hempstead Village. The commercial doesn't say where Rice cut drug crime, but Phillips said, "The ad is entirely clear."

The camera caresses the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge with Manhattan as a backdrop, and focuses on Rice - who faces four opponents in a Sept. 14 Democratic primary. The narrator says she "reduced drug crimes 70 percent with a groundbreaking drug treatment and job training program."

Tiny white lettering says Hempstead Police Department Reports, 2008 and flashes by in an instant on a blur of blue. In a computer freeze frame, it appears the blur is an overhead shot of an unidentified neighborhood. Phillips said yesterday that viewers should realize that the small lettering refers to Hempstead's statistics on the Terrace Avenue program.

At the end of a week in which Rice and another attorney general candidate, state Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan), engaged in a verbal brawl over his perceived exaggeration of a former job, Phillips insisted the commercial doesn't embellish Rice's drug crime reduction work. Rice contends Schneiderman lied at a candidates' debate when he said he ran a prison drug rehab program while he was a Massachusetts deputy sheriff. Rice says Schneiderman didn't run the program.

Spokesman James Freedland says Schneiderman was the administrative coordinator who wrote grants and raised funds for the program. But Freedland has refused to say Schneiderman ran the program. Freedland had no comment on Rice's commercial.

"Eric was the administrative coordinator of the first comprehensive drug and alcohol treatment program at the jail, and as the sheriff under whom Eric served at the time confirmed, he was instrumental in getting the program off the ground," Freedland said.

Early yesterday, Schneiderman sent a letter asking the other candidates to sign a pledge not to attack each other. Freedland said none had agreed to do so by the end of day. Later in the day, Rice campaign manager Jeffrey Stein sent a letter to Schneiderman, again questioning Schneiderman's role in the drug program and said: "We reject your assertion from your letter this morning that questioning of you has been personal."

When asked about Schneiderman's request for a pledge, Phillips said, "We will sign any pledge to that regard. State Senator Schneiderman's entire campaign has been built on personally attacking District Attorney Rice so this pledge falls somewhere between hilarious and classic hypocrisy from an Albany insider."