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 district.
Democrat Eric Adams is officially invested mayor of New YorkSaturday 1is January. He thus becomes, at 61, the second African-American in history to hold this position. Child of Brooklyn, former policeman, former senator, anti-racist trade unionist… His atypical profile had made him the big favorite in the ballot in this city historically classified on the left.
Presenting himself as a “moderate” democrat, he managed to seduce both the working classes, by playing cheerfully on his personal history, and more conservative circles. On November 3, he 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
Une success story
Eric Adams symbolizes the perfect “American dream”. He was born in 1960 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Big Apple. He spent his childhood and teenage years in South Jamaica, Queens where he lived with his five siblings and his mother, a housekeeper, who raised them alone, can we read in his biographyposted on his campaign website.
As a teenager, he fell into delinquency, embroiled in stories of rival gangs. At the age of 15, he was arrested and beaten by the police and then imprisoned for several weeks in a detention center for minors. Paradoxically, it was this episode that gave birth to a vocation, he says regularly: it was at this time that he decided to become a police officer. The goal: “Change the system from within.”
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 combat 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 left the uniform to go into politics. First elected to the New York Senate between 2007 and 2013, he then took over the presidency of the Brooklyn borough, a position often presented as a springboard for mayor of New York. relate le New York Times.
“This man is one of us”
Throughout his campaign, Eric Adams has consistently made 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 entrusted in tears.
“New York has chosen one of you, one of us. 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 achieved my dream 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 leads the New York police
During his campaign, the former policeman thus logically made security a central issue. Its main promise: to fight severely against the increase in crime 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 aedile of New York. Even before he took office, he decided to number 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, she will now have to manage the 35,000 police officers of New York.
First woman to lead the New York police, she will be the third black person in this position. It will therefore have the difficult task of maintaining security in New York while restoring the population’s confidence in its police, accused of having violent, racist and corrupt agents in its ranks.
Et according to Le Monde, this choice was not insignificant. To decide between them, the candidates had to simulate a press conference supposed to take place after a white police officer killed an unarmed black person. Keechant Sewell would have prevailed 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 is easily displayed as a defender of the middle and working classes, he also knows how to reassure business circles. 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 party figures, in particular Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself elected from New York to the House of Representatives and ranked very 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 implementing a “Tax Free Tuesday”one day a week without mandatory deductions.
The new city councilor has also made it one of his priorities to bring back the estimated 25,000 to 35,000 New Yorkers who left during the Covid-19 pandemic. “On January 2, 2022, I’m taking a flight to Florida, and I’m telling all these New Yorkers who live in Florida, ‘Get your butt 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 setting up its headquarters in Queens.
Other challenges await Eric Adams at the head of New York. He will have to manage the return to normal in schools, offices and shops, fight against poor housing, infrastructure in poor condition or even climate risks, but also finally close Rikers Island, a terrible overcrowded, ultra-violent and unsanitary prison.
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