Elected on November 3 as mayor of New York, Eric Adams officially takes office on Saturday. A consecration for this 61-year-old African-American, a former police officer from a poor family in the Brooklyn neighborhood.
Democrat Eric Adams is officially invested mayor of New York, Saturday 1is January. He thus becomes, at 61, the second African-American in history to hold this position. Child of Brooklyn, former police officer, former senator, anti-racist trade unionist … His atypical profile had made him the big favorite of the poll in this city historically classified on the left.
Presenting himself as a “moderate” democrat, he has succeeded in winning over both the popular classes, by playing happily on his personal history, as well as the more conservative circles. On November 3, he had won hands down against his Republican rival, Curtis Sliwa, winning 67% of the votes cast.
It’s official — our five-borough, knock-every-door, reach-every-voter campaign was successful: We have won the race for Mayor of New York City!
This is my dream come true, and I couldn’t be more proud to represent the City that we all love as your Mayor-elect ????????
— Eric Adams (@ericadamsfornyc) November 3, 2021
A success story
Eric Adams symbolizes the perfect “American dream”. He was born in 1960 in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, one of the poorest in the Big Apple. He spent his childhood and adolescence in South Jamaica, Queens where he lived with his five siblings and his mother, a housekeeper, who raised them on her own, can we read in his biography, published on his campaign site.
As a teenager, he fell into delinquency, embarked on stories of rival gangs. When he was 15, he was arrested and beaten by the police and then imprisoned for several weeks in a juvenile detention center. Paradoxically, it was this episode that gave birth to a vocation, he recounts regularly: it was at this point that he decided to become a police officer. The objective: “To change the system from the inside.”
A few years later, at 22, Eric Adams joined the ranks of the New York police (NYPD), the largest police force in the country. He made a career there for 22 years, until he rose to the rank of captain.
During these years, he distinguished himself by his fight against discrimination and police violence. In 1995, he co-founded “100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care”, an anti-racist union whose objective is to fight discrimination against the black community. At the same time, he became president of the Grand Council of Guardians, an association bringing together black police officers.
In 2006, he quit the uniform to get into politics. First elected to the New York Senate between 2007 and 2013, he then took the presidency of the Brooklyn district, a position often presented as a springboard for New York City Hall, relate le New York Times.
“This man is one of us”
Throughout his campaign, Eric Adams never ceased to make his success story one of his arguments, embellishing each of his speeches with personal anecdotes. “I wanted to tell my story,” he explains to the New York Times. “I wanted people to be like ‘This man is one of us.'”
In July, for example, he had thus brought a portrait of his mother deceased when going to vote for the Democratic primary for the nomination. “I’m not supposed to be here (as a candidate, editor’s note). But since I’m here, New Yorkers will realize every day that they also deserve to be in this city,” he had confided in tears.
“New York has chosen one of you, one of ours. I am you. I am you”, he also launched after the announcement of his victory, on November 3, in front of a hotel from Brooklyn. “Tonight, I have made my dream come true and, with all my heart, I will remove the barriers that prevent you from achieving yours,” he promised.
Still, his description on his Twitter account remains in the same line: he presents himself above all as a “proud son of Brownsville”. The status of “future mayor of New York” comes only after.
A black woman in charge of the New York police force
During his campaign, the former police officer has logically made security a central issue. Its main promise: to fight severely against crime that has increased since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, while continuing to fight against discrimination against African Americans.
And this is also the subject of his first flagship measure as a New York City councilor. Even before taking office, he decided to name Keechant Sewell, a black woman from Queens, head of the NYPD. The latter was until now responsible for the police of the small county of Nassau, it will now have to manage the 35,000 police officers of New York.
The first woman to lead the New York Police Department, she will be the third black person in this position. It will therefore have the heavy task of maintaining security in New York while restoring the confidence of the population in its police, accused of having in its ranks violent, racist and corrupt agents.
And according to Le Monde, this choice was not trivial. To decide between them, the candidates had to simulate a press conference supposed to take place after a white policeman killed an unarmed black person. Keechant Sewell would have won it by having had words of compassion for the victim.
>> To read: George Floyd: have civil rights progressed in the United States with #BLM?
A “moderate” and “pragmatic” democrat
But if Eric Adams easily appears as a defender of the middle and popular classes, he also knows how to reassure the business community. For good reason, if his predecessor Bill de Blasio presented himself as a representative of the left wing of the Democratic Party, the new city councilor prefers to define himself as a “moderate democrat” and “pragmatic”.
In recent months, he has not hesitated to clearly oppose the former mayor but also other figures of the party, in particular to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself elected New Yorker to the House of Representatives and ranked far to the left.
And the issue of security is no exception. The former police officer is categorically opposed to the “Defund the Police” project, carried by part of the Democratic clan, which wishes to withdraw funds from the police to finance social projects.
But it is especially on the economic question that Eric Adams is decried by his clan. Among his campaign proposals, he wants, for example, to reduce the number of municipal officials and reduce taxes by setting up a “Tax Free Tuesday”, a weekly day without compulsory deductions.
The new city councilor has also made it one of his priorities to bring back the 25,000 to 35,000 New Yorkers, according to estimates, who left during the Covid-19 pandemic. “On January 2, 2022, I’m taking a flight to Florida, and I say to all those New Yorkers living in Florida, ‘Bring your ass back to New York’,” he assured the Wall Street Journal. While adding: “I don’t blame them for leaving. New York has become too violent, too bureaucratic, too expensive to do business.”
And to do this, he wants to attract large companies to the megalopolis. A frank snub to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who fought in 2019 to prevent Amazon from establishing its headquarters in Queens.
Other challenges await Eric Adams at the head of New York. He will have to manage the return to normalcy in schools, offices and businesses, fight against poor housing, poor infrastructure and climatic risks, but also finally close Rikers Island, a terrible overcrowded, ultra-violent and unsanitary prison.
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