Dan Conley is working the sidelines at the Bromley-Heath basketball courts on a hot Saturday afternoon. The idea behind the annual basketball tournament taking place is to let teens at the Jamaica Plain housing development engage in friendly competition with cops, probation officers, and school police. It’s a chance for Bromley-Heath kids to engage in a wholesome showdown against squads of law enforcement officials with whom their off-court encounters are often considerably less friendly.

The annual competition, now in its seventh year, is called the Meet the Face Behind the Badge tournament, and it’s a fitting stop for Conley because that might as well be the theme of his campaign.

The veteran Suffolk County district attorney seems well-positioned in the 12-way scramble for mayor. He’s raised more than $1 million, has a solid campaign organization, and his TV ads have been blanketing — littering some might say — the airwaves. But all of that won’t be enough if Conley can’t convince enough voters he has more to offer than a prosecutor’s zeal for locking people up.

Conley, who served for eight years on the City Council before becoming DA in 2002, understands the hurdles prosecutors can face in running for other offices. He faces a particularly daunting challenge in minority neighborhoods, where distrust of police and prosecutors can run deep. Rather than running away from his years in the law enforcement trenches, however, Conley is trying to use them to explain why he understands better than most the plight of the city’s most dispossessed.

“One of the things that people always need to be reminded of is that our job is about serving victims,” Conley says while riding through Roxbury in his SUV on his way to a South Boston event after leaving the basketball tournament. “While here in the minority community there’s been an overrepresentation, if that’s the right way to put it, of people who are arrested and prosecuted for crime, the overwhelming demographic of the victims are people of color also. These are the people that I serve. These are the people that I speak for. These are the people who have been shot or stabbed or sexually assaulted or, worse, murdered. I give voice to the voiceless.”

His pitch can come off as overly dramatic, but only a few minutes earlier that side of his job came into remarkable focus. While greeting spectators at the Bromley-Heath tournament, Conley was stopped by Audrey Brown-Perkins. He confessed that he didn’t remember her, but she knew him well, reminding him of his office’s successful prosecution of a notorious gangbanger convicted in the 2006 murder of her 20-year-old son, Antoine Perkins. She thanked him for that, and for the kind words Conley had offered in a statement at the time about her younger son, who offered a poignant victim impact statement at the sentencing of his brother’s killer. “I give him a lot of credit,” Brown-Perkins said of the work Conley and his office did on the case.

A chance encounter: Conley with Audrey Brown-Perkins, whose son’s murderer his office successfully prosecuted.

“I don’t get a lot of people who come up and say, ‘You unfairly prosecuted my child,’” Conley says later, on the drive through Roxbury. “Maybe people look at me and they’d rather not approach me, I don’t know. But that doesn’t happen to me out there. What I do get is a lot more encounters like I had with Audrey.”

Conley was never a backslapper while on the city council, and he doesn’t have the natural ease of some other candidates on the campaign trail. His ability to speak poignantly about the plight of crime victims can also quickly get lost, as it did in a recent televised debate when he found himself awkwardly acknowledging a “modest” increase in shootings as he tried to defend the recent record of local law enforcement officials.

There is much overlap in the themes of the campaigns in the crowded mayoral field, with one contender’s talk of making Boston work for all residents blurring into another’s commitment to ensure that the city not become a place of only the very rich and very poor. Conley is another voice in this candidate chorus. But he has offered a surprisingly sharp rhetorical framing of that mission.

“I want Boston to be a place of hope and opportunity and progress for everyone,” he says, recounting the experience of his maternal grandparents, Italian immigrants who arrived “without any money and minimal education and language skills.”

Conley at the Bromley-Heath tournament. He says cities should provide “a path out of poverty.”

Conley talks about the role cities play in ways that practically channel the great urban thinker Jane Jacobs, who wrote, “Cities don’t lure the middle class, they create it.”

“Cities were places of opportunity,” Conley says of the Boston his grandparents arrived in. The great promise of cities, he says, is to provide “a path out of poverty and into the working poor, and out of the working poor and into the middle class.”

Conley has laid out a jobs plan that he says will help do that. Like a number of candidates in the race, however, he zeroes in on school reform as the key lever the next mayor can pull to make good on the promise of cities to help drive upward mobility. Calling education reform “a social justice issue,” Conley backs lifting the cap on charter schools and empowering school leaders in the district system with more control over staffing and other decisions.

Aggressive school reform is ground that John Connolly staked out early on and has centered much of his campaign on, so it’s not clear how much traction Dan Conley gets on the issue. Similarly, for all his effort to frame his connection to the minority community as that of a public official principally dedicated to its safety, not to putting its members in custody, Conley polled just 1 percent among black voters in the most recent Boston Globe poll.

His strength heading into the September 24 preliminary election, according to the Globe poll, is among more conservative-leaning voters (he was the top choice of those identifying as Republican) and residents of Southwest Boston neighborhoods, including Hyde Park where he was raised, and West Roxbury, where he now lives. Among that base of supporters, Conley’s law-and-order background is no doubt an asset.

Still, he seems acutely aware that the broader message he has fashioned — an opportunity agenda to keep people from ever having dealings with the DA’s office — is what he’ll ultimately need to be elected if he makes through the preliminary and on to the November 5 final election.