More truncheon than command rod

Long before the murderous knee on George Floyd’s neck, New York had Amadou Diallo. Bruce Springsteen dedicated a song to him, which he continues to perform as if it were a novelty: 41 shots .

In 1999, four officers shot him – he received 19 of the 41 bullets in his body – as he entered his home in the Bronx. He had no outstanding accounts. He was unarmed. The reason?

Just be black.

Play the trick more police than social, with which it attracts conservatives and angers progressives

Eric Adams, an African American, had been with the New York Police Department (NYPD) at the time. On that date he wore the rank of captain and had already been the founder of the 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care (100 blacks in the security forces who care), an internal group that spoke out against police brutality and actions for racial profiling.

Several years later, in 2015, Kadiatou Diallo, the mother, met Adams at an event organized by Columbia University. In the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement had begun, after the deaths of Michael Brown (Ferguson) or Eric Garner (New Yord). Retired from the NYPD, a former state senator and serving as Brooklyn Borough President, Adams spoke on the public response to the outbreaks of tension in the country.

“You can take to the streets, but peacefully, not like in Ferguson. You cannot chant that black lives matter and burn the communities where blacks live, ”he said.

Suddenly an outburst was heard from the audience.

–Ask for forgiveness for what you say. In Ferguson they did the right thing, people die, the police attack us, we cannot let this continue. For decades, we have had a mentality in which the police act as an occupying force that is not punished. They care more that a gas station burns than people die.

He knows that the Democratic majority in the Big Apple is overwhelming and that his rival sounds like a joke.

Adams, who will turn 61 in September, did not apologize and the support of the Black community of the Big Apple has propelled him this summer to be the de facto mayor today. He has prevailed in the Democratic primaries and he himself is the winner next November.

“Listen to me, I’m the mayor,” he said this week at the annual Brooklyn Democratic Party dinner. He knows that the Democratic majority in the metropolis is overwhelming and that his Republican rival, Curtis Sliva, in the red beret of the Guardian Angels , a kind of paramilitary chavista operetta, sounds like a joke in bad taste. Even The New York Post , organ of the extreme right, bets on Adams.

And here is the paradox that everyone assumes that he will be the second black mayor in New York history.

Republicans (among whom he was originally a member) and more conservative Democrats embrace his position to reinforce the NYPD and its central message of law and order. Meanwhile, his candidacy arouses skepticism among progressives: in Adams they see more the police than the committed citizen.

“I am the Biden of New York,” he proclaimed Monday, after visiting the White House invited by the president to discuss strategies against the increase in shootings.

No one doubts that if the primaries had been in 2019, he would never have been elected. But the era of the pandemic has triggered crime and Adams has played the security card to unseat rivals. His victory represents a rejection of the forces of the left.

He was the rebel policeman fighting most of his companions and he is the politician of contradictions

He is also promoted as the defender of the workers, of the blue collar (for the blue overalls) from its origins. Today a vegan and evangelist, Adams was born and raised in Bronwsville, one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods, the fourth of six siblings raised only by their mother, a cook and a floor cleaner.

Adams was the rebel policeman fighting most of his companions – he decided to be a uniformed man after receiving a beating from an agent because of the color of his skin – and he is the politician of contradictions. It may look like a outsider , which exhibits drowned rats at a press conference to warn about the plague of rodents, or the representative of the establishment supported by the forces of the economic system.

In that act of the Columbia, after the outburst of one of the assistants, Adams recovered the pulse and the word to give him some advice: “Become a policeman.”

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