One day after a state assemblyman from Boro Park, Dov Hikind, suggested that police should be allowed to conduct non-random searches of Arab passengers on the subways, the issue of racial profiling took center stage in the four-way fight for the Democratic Party’s nomination for Brooklyn district attorney.

Two candidates – the four-term incumbent, Charles Hynes, and a former deputy commissioner for trials in the Koch administration’s Police Department, Arnold Kriss – vowed not to accept Mr. Hikind’s support. The assemblyman’s endorsement, which could carry significant weight among Orthodox Jewish voters, will now almost certainly go to a black state senator from Bedford-Stuyvesant, John Sampson.

Although Mr. Kriss said yesterday that he would never take an endorsement from a politician who supports racial profiling, the honorary co-chairman of the Kriss campaign is the former three-term mayor, Edward Koch, who told The New York Sun yesterday that racial profiling as an anti-terrorist tactic is “common sense.”

Mr. Hikind, a Democrat who endorsed Mayor Bloomberg on Thursday, had already ruled out the possibility of backing Mr. Kriss or the fourth candidate in the field, Mark Peters, an outspoken opponent of racial profiling who is the former chief of state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s anti-corruption division.

In an interview with the Sun last month, Mr. Hikind had said he was wavering between Messrs. Hynes and Sampson. Now the incumbent appears to have taken himself out of the running for the influential assemblyman’s backing.

“Hynes would not accept the endorsement of anybody who advocates racial profiling, which is illegal under our constitution,” a spokesman for the DA’s campaign, Mortimer Matz, said.

When informed of the Hynes campaign statement yesterday, Mr. Hikind said: “I’m not losing any sleep tonight.”

A Sampson spokesman, David Vermillion, said the state senator “does not approve of profile searches done on individuals who appear to be of Arabic descent,” but Mr. Vermillion also noted: “You don’t always agree on every point with everyone who may or may not endorse you.”

Mr. Sampson has courted Mr. Hikind’s support, joining the assemblyman on a trip to Israel in May and denouncing the Sharon government’s plans to uproot Jewish settlements on the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, Mr. Koch, speaking to the Sun yesterday from his Manhattan law office, repeated his objections to the Police Department’s much-heralded random-search policy.

“I believe that if you’re standing in line at a subway station, and if there are five people, and four of them are talking Arabic, and one of them is a 60-year-old lady with a chrysanthemum on her jacket … that if the only one of the five to be interrogated is the little old lady, that’s nuts,” Mr. Koch, who served as mayor between 1978 and 1990, said.

After he was told of Mr. Kriss’s avowal not to accept an endorsement from any proponent of racial profiling, Mr. Peters asked: “Is Arnie Kriss now going to renounce Ed Koch’s support?”

When that question was posed to Mr. Kriss, the candidate’s response was blunt: “No.”

“You can’t put Ed Koch in the same category as Dov Hikind,” Mr. Kriss said. “The mayor has a long history of fairness and civil liberties, going back to the days he marched in Mississippi in the 1960s.”

Mr. Koch said he wants to allow police officers to use their “professional instincts” in deciding which subway riders to search. He said he believes that officers conducting non-random searches should be required to file incident reports, and that the paper trail would act as a safeguard against abuses.

Mr. Koch also said he should not be characterized as a supporter of racial profiling because “people talking Arabic is not a race.”

Mr. Kriss, while stressing that he “cannot tolerate racial profiling,” said he believes that police officers should conduct non-random searches if they have a “reasonable basis” for suspicion.

“Hikind wants to stop everyone of Arab descent,” Mr. Kriss said.

But the assemblyman said Mr. Kriss’s charge is “dishonest.”

Mr. Hikind told the Sun: “I have bent over backwards to say just the opposite. … If 15 people of Middle Eastern background walk into a subway station, if the police officer feels that there’s no reason to search them, then he should search none of them.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the front-runner in the Democratic mayoral primary, Fernando Ferrer, called on Mr. Bloomberg to distance himself from Mr. Hikind’s remarks. “If he doesn’t agree with someone whom he stood proudly with a few days ago,” the Ferrer spokesman, Christy Setzer, said of the mayor, “he needs to tell us where he really does stand.”

The mayor has made no secret, however, of his vehement and unequivocal opposition to racial profiling. “The law prohibits you from profiling – period, end of story,” Mr. Bloomberg said Friday on his weekly WABC radio show.

The issue has achieved new prominence in New York City because of the decision July 21 by the mayor and his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, to institute random searches of passengers entering subway stops.