Former police officer, ex-offender and anti-racist activist … Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York with an extraordinary career

The “city that never sleeps” celebrated the New Year with its new mayor, Eric Adams. On the night of Friday to Saturday, the former policeman took an oath on the Bible in front of a crowd of 15,000 New Yorkers gathered in Times Square for the transition to the new year. Surrounded by his family, the 61-year-old reached out for the sacred text with the photo of his late mother in the other. “I, Eric Adams, solemnly swear to support the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of the State of New York and the Charter of the City of New York”, Eric Adams swore, before proclaiming: “New York is back”.

Elected on November 2, 2021 against Republican Curtis Silva, he succeeds Bill de Blasio and becomes the 110th mayor of the American megalopolis. However, nothing in his unusual trajectory foreshadowed one day that he would take over New York.

Born to a housemaid mother and a butcher father, in a working-class neighborhood of Queens, Eric Adams began his career in the police ranks. A vocation drawn from his experience of “young offender”, when he was 15, as he likes to say. Violently arrested by the police, forced to stay in prison in a center for minors, he then decides to “change the system from the inside”. He eventually spent 22 years in the police force, until he reached the rank of captain.

Deeply anti-racist, in 1995 he founded a union to fight against this scourge and protect the black community, within the largest police force in the United States. Almost two decades later, the institution is still regularly pointed out, accused of turning a blind eye to violent agents, even recently during demonstrations. Black Lives Matter.

In 2006, he left the police to enter the political world. He was elected to the New York Senate, then president of the Brooklyn borough, a position he has held for eight years. But his old profession remains at the heart of his concerns. Unlike New York’s representative in the House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Eric Adams remains far from the left wing of the Democratic Party. The star of the party favored him one of his opponents, Maya Wiley, who came third in the Democratic primary for this election.

Briefly enrolled in the ranks of the Republican Party, the candidate for mayor of New York wants in particular to be intractable in the face of crimes and misdemeanors. For this, he refuses to reduce the budgets allocated to the police. Eric Adams has focused his campaign on an increase in shootings (+ 32% in the first half of 2021 compared to the same period of 2020).

He also presents himself as close to financial circles, and affirms that with him in power, “New York will no longer be anti-business”. He opposes, for example, the flagship proposal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of “tax the rich”. “65,000 people pay 51% of our taxes”, replies Eric Adams, estimating that if these thousands of taxpayers leave, the city of New York “will no longer be able to have firefighters or teachers.”

Positions which have even enabled it to benefit from the support of New York Post, a newspaper however conservative, which devoted an editorial to it at the end of October. The authors then qualified Eric Adams as “enthusiastic choice” for the town hall of the megalopolis of eight million inhabitants, and candidate the “better placed to fight crime and disturbances of public order”.

After being sworn in on the night of Friday to Saturday, the former police officer, who became vegan after a diabetes alert, became the second African-American mayor of New York, after David Dinkins in the early 1990s.