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New York - Racial politics may have played a role in helping Rudolph W. Giuliani beat the incumbent mayor, David N. Dinkins, in the 1993 race, but Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg seems to want none of it.

Mr. Bloomberg, who is seeking a third term against City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. — who, like Mr. Dinkins, is black — has carefully avoided discussing the comments made by Mr. Giuliani during a Bloomberg campaign event on Sunday, when Mr. Giuliani tried to stoke old fears of crime and unrest among Orthodox Jewish leaders in Brooklyn in case Mr. Thompson is elected.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Mr. Giuliani told the group, in what many people in Mr. Thompson’s camp have interpreted as a reference to the days of unchecked violence during the 1991 riots in Crown Heights that started after an out-of-control car driven by a Brooklyn Hasid struck and killed a 7-year-old black child.

On Monday, as he received the endorsement of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police union, Mr. Bloomberg sought to define himself as a uniter, not a divider, to borrow a phrase from President George W. Bush.

“I am phenomenally proud of our record of bringing people together from all neighborhoods and every community,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who is running on the Republican and Independence Party lines. “And I think we’ve successfully resisted attempts to divide the city.”

See below video clip from the Event where Giuliani made his remarks

He added: “For the past eight years, I’ve worked well with virtually everyone. I don’t point fingers. I try to lower the volume, the temperature, and not raise it. I’m not going to try to raise it now.”

It was Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the patrolmen’s union, who offered a rebuttal of sorts to Mr. Giuliani’s remarks, saying: “In a campaign, you’ve got a number of different people with a number of different opinions. You don’t always agree with everyone that endorses you.”

As for his union’s own endorsement of the mayor — the first time it has supported Mr. Bloomberg — Mr. Lynch was clear that the contract agreement reached with the city last year was what sealed the deal.

In 2005, when the union endorsed no one, “we were without a contract,” Mr. Lynch said.

“To our members,” he said, “to our union, that’s an overriding issue.” (The union endorsed Mark Green, a Democrat, when Mr. Bloomberg first ran for office in 2001.)

Earning the police union’s endorsement is a major coup for Mr. Bloomberg, who now counts on the support of all of the city’s five police unions. But the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, which had backed him in 2001 and 2005, endorsed Mr. Thompson this time around; the union’s president, Norman I. Seabrook, said that Mr. Bloomberg had made the city unaffordable to working New Yorkers during his years in office.

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