The story of the former police captain includes a beating by the police and some scandal. Almost certainly, he will be mayor of the city that never sleeps in six months.
In a city where six out of seven voters are Democrats, we can take it for granted that former Police Captain Eric Adams will be mayor in six months.
His glancing victory in the party’s primaries, after two weeks of a recount, leaves us with several lessons about the political landscape of both New York and the United States.
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A political landscape that Adams knew how to read and take advantage of to his advantage.
The 60-year-old African American, then president of the Brooklyn borough, has made street safety one of his main campaign assets.
A centrist message that has won him the decisive backing of several unions and the majority of voters of color in Brooklyn and Queens, in a context of insecurity: shootings in New York increased 73% year-on-year last May.
His victory has sparked acid comments from the right-wing, delighted to see how a crime-conscious ex-cop is the front-runner to win the mayoralty: proof that the activist turmoil of the past year, under the slogan of ‘defunding’ the police, would only be the clamor of a, particularly noisy minority.
Adams himself accused left–wing whites of occupying the stage on behalf of minorities. “This, really, is being led by a different demographic,” Adams said last April, referring to the movement that, following the assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis, demanded to remove resources from law enforcement.
“There are a lot of white and wealthy young people who are coming to dominate the conversation.”
He is not the only one who has this opinion. Of the original dozen mayoral candidates, only one embraced the idea of “defunding’ the police.
Then the aspirant focused his campaign on working-class and colored neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. With the exceptions of Harlem and Washington Heights, where a majority of blacks and Latinos live, Adams barely set foot in Manhattan.
“We don’t want sophisticated candidates,” he declared.
In his final appeal to the voters, from the pages of the local newspaper ‘New York Daily News’, Adams ran as a neighborhood New Yorker and claimed his “lived experience”: what, according to him, separated him from the rest of the candidates and it gave detailed, personal knowledge of the great New York dilemmas.
“I was one of six children raised by a single mom who cleaned houses, not always knowing if we would come home to an eviction notice on the front door or food on the table,” wrote the Democrat.
“So I also understand the struggles of paying the rent, finding affordable child care, and having enough in the bank to make it to the end of the week.”
Adams’ life journey had its moment of truth in adolescence. When he was 15 years old, he and his brother were beaten by police officers.
According to their testimony, the officers arrested them for trespassing on private property. Once in custody, they were abused and repeatedly hit in the groin.
For the next seven days, they urinated blood.
“I left there with the belief that that was behind us. A bad encounter,” Adams stated during an interview in 2016.
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“But as time went by, I realized that every time I saw a police car, every time I saw them turn up, every time I heard a siren, I revived it. And it is never left behind ”.
For this reason, Adams would have ended up becoming a police officer. At the age of 24, the African American graduated second in his promotion from the Academy, with the will, as he has said many times, to reform the body from within.
Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images