Eric Adams, the ex-cop who promises to bring order to New York City | International

Eric Adams (New York, 60 years old) likes to remember his modest origins. The fourth of six children born to a married couple of a butcher and a cleaner, he grew up in working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens, two of the city’s five boroughs, and had a run-in with police as a teenager when he and one of his brothers were beaten by the officers in an incident that he relates to the color of their skin; with the fact of being black and, therefore, a habitual suspect before any representative of the forces of order.

But Adams reversed the situation, studied law while working endless jobs to pay for his career, and became a policeman – ultimately a department captain – and later a politician. In November, the second black mayor of the city with the most millionaires per square meter in the world, no less than a million, will be elected in all probability. It is not a bad ending for the life trajectory of the neighborhood boy without expectations to end up as the ruler of a city with so much power.

Adams has been given the victory in the Democratic primaries for mayor its former neighbors, working-class residents of Brooklyn and Queens, as well as Latinos and African Americans in the Bronx, as well as strong support from unions representing blue-collar workers, factory workers and shopkeepers, and today, of services devastated by the pandemic, such as hospitality. Manhattan, the Big Apple, the epicenter of finance and excess -also of a bleeding inequality-, it is not his fiefdom, because he voted en masse for his rival Kathryn Garcia, the no-nonsense technocrat’s favorite establishment, who came second in the race, just 8,000 votes away. “A diverse, historic coalition of the five boroughs led by working-class New Yorkers has led us to victory,” Adams recalled Tuesday.

The second black mayor after David N. Dinkins (1990-1993) will have a recently approved record budget, 99,000 million dollars (about 83,400 million euros) -including 14,000 million in federal aid-, to prop up the economic recovery after the pandemic and face entrenched challenges, such as unequal access to housing in a market with impossible prices. They seem like primary objectives, and they are, but in Adams’s case they are subordinated to another priority: to restore law and order. in the face of the worrying increase in shootings and homicides in the streets, with a disproportionate incidence in black and Latino neighborhoods. “I grew up poor in Brooklyn and Queens. I wore a bulletproof vest [como policía] to provide security to my neighbors, “he recalled this week on Twitter. After surrendering the service weapon, he keeps the license and admits that he has one.

During the campaign, Adams promised to improve the provision of social services, such as the quality of school menus offered to underprivileged students, or to strengthen support networks to prevent young people from joining one of the many gangs. to which the authorities attribute the increase in armed violence, a phenomenon so worrying that it has deserved the declaration of emergency by the state governor. But, unlike other coreligionists who defend diverting funds from the police budget to social programs, Adams does not plan to undermine his resources and to recover special units to combat organized crime. More than a councilor, many see him, and have voted for him, as a chief police officer for a city that has not yet forgotten the decades of violence at the end of the last century.