NEW YORK LETTER
Eric Adams is a former black police officer from Brooklyn. At 61, the elected mayor of New York, who will take office on 1is January 2022, will attempt a delicate balancing act: be tough against delinquency which has increased sharply since the Covid-19 pandemic; be fair, especially with black and Latino minorities. His team is announced in his image: the Democrat created a surprise by appointing to lead the New York police a black woman, born in the district of Queens.
Aged 49, Keechant Sewell was until now the head of the Nassau County (east of New York, on Long Island) police force, responsible for a team of 350 police officers. The policewoman will make a huge leap, managing the 35,000 police officers in New York City. Communication was well orchestrated. Mayor-elect Eric Adams explained that the candidates had to perform, during their recruitment, a mock press conference, supposed to take place after a white policeman killed an unarmed black person.
Mme Sewell would have won it by having had words of compassion for the victim. “She understood that there had been a tragedy because a life had been lostEric Adams, a former Brooklyn kid who was assaulted by police as a teenager, told reporters. This is what we need to understand. ” This is not always obvious in the United States.
Nevertheless, Mme Sewell will tighten the screw, as homicides jumped by almost half (468 in 2020 against 319 in 2019). The tension has not subsided in 2021: on December 5, the number of murders recorded since the beginning of the year reached 443 in New York. We are certainly far from the record of 2,262 in 1990, in the midst of the war on drugs; November has seen a ebb, but the subject is politically hot. Outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio had removed random checks, which were de facto discriminatory against blacks and Latinos, and dissolved a plainclothes police unit. The future mayor intends to reestablish the latter, to track down arms trafficking. New York is relatively peaceful due to ultra-strict gun laws.
The closure of Rikers Island prison, another delicate matter
The other subject is the sinister island-prison of Rikers, which accommodates inmates awaiting trial. This one is out of control. She has seen 16 deaths among detainees since the start of the year, mostly by suicide.
The prison is the victim of massive absenteeism by the guards, up to 2,000 guards absent during the Covid-19, out of a staff of 7,800. The latter are accused by official reports of not providing essential assistance to inmates while the gangs are reigning terror in the prison complex. Rikers had been reduced in size during the health crisis, but it now has more than 5,000 inmates, who cost an average of $ 500,000 (about 440,000 euros) per year to manage. Mr. Adams has taken over the plan to close Rikers that Bill de Blasio had finally accepted in 2017 under political pressure.
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