In his first major endorsement since he officially announced his re-election campaign last week, Mayor Brandon Scott put his support behind Angela Alsobrooks for U.S. Senator, who is running to replace Senator Ben Cardin.
If successful, the current Prince George’s County Executive would be the first Black female senator from Maryland.
“We always say when you want to have people who want to move up [in] elected office to actually accomplish things, you look at mayors and county executives, as we've been where the rubber meets the road,” said Mayor Scott from a late Tuesday press conference held at the Zeta Senior Center in Park Heights, the mayor’s childhood neighborhood.
Scott emphasized the need for a federal partner that would support the city’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy — the mayor’s holistic gun violence reduction strategy that has shown some evidence of success in some areas.
Alsobrooks, who previously served two terms as the State’s Attorney for Prince George’s County, said that Maryland struggles from a “public health crisis” that she described as a “misdiagnosed… crime crisis” when she accepted Scott’s endorsement on Tuesday.
“As a prosecutor, I came to understand that we were incarcerating… so many people who were suffering from addiction and mental illness rather than giving them the help they needed to be healed,” she said. “It has been a priority of mine, as county executive, to bring more and more dollars in treatment for mental illness and for addictions.”
Alsobrooks said she planned to take similar priorities at the federal level. Last June, she vetoed a $250,000 budget amendment passed by the Prince George’s City Council that would have expanded an existing program to increase mental health services, education and job training to juvenile offenders before they were released from incarceration with the hopes of reducing recidivism. At the time, she cited a potential $60 million budget shortfall as the reason for her veto.
Alsobrooks, however, did not endorse Scott on Tuesday. Instead she said she hopes to receive many endorsements, including that of former mayor Sheila Dixon, who leads Scott in the most recent Goucher poll which looked at next year’s mayoral race in Baltimore. In that September poll, 39% of registered city Democrats said they would vote for Dixon while 27% were in favor of Scott, another 23% said they favored another candidate.
Alsobrooks is opposed in the Democratic primary by Congressman David Trone, who won the support last week of the country’s largest labor union: the National Education Association.
